...it's not about whether you win, so much as it is about how.
And so it came to pass. When Arsene saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.
He began to teach them, saying:
I had my doubts, yes, at certain moments...I also have a responsibility in regard to the supporters and to the club who have always trusted me...They've always had faith in me...
Yea, though he walks in the shadow of death (oh, alright; in the shadow of Alex Ferguson...) he shall fear no evil... After all, he has endured the loss of the prodigal son;
And I said [un]to him: 'But Thierry, I understand your problem completely. I think the team will be very strong, very soon but I understand why you ask the question'...
So, with his father's blessing, the Prodigal was gone. But fear not, Arsene has been blessed. How has else has he in survived in top-level European management at the same club for so long?
I've had tremendous luck... I had the good fortune to find good people here, people I've trusted.
Good people, people he's trusted. But what of destiny, does he believe in that?
Yes. For me, success in life is a happy turn of events that you make with your own attitude.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in the Emirates!
We have [already] entered another dimension. And when the debts are paid...
And when will this come to pass?
Between 20 and 23 years' time... but I believe we will see a difference after the end of the 2008-09 season. We will have much greater resources at our disposal. My priority will be to keep the players I already have. Above all I believe in the virtues of a collective ethos and I believe that you can only maintain that and develop if you have a culture to impart; a culture that you can pass from generation to generation. And these generations of players must be imbued with that culture to be able to pass it on. If the clubs only become a place to come and a place to leave, then the club won't go very far. The love for the game must be passed on.
And Arsene so loved the game he gave it a team. But suffered the little children to come unto him:
...this young Arsenal team... has matured together. Which also means it has suffered together; it's important to share the pain. Think of the disappointments of last year and, in spite of all that, I felt they turned the corner. When we've been knocked back - walked into a head-wind, so to speak - we've never given up, we've always fought on. And I [sayeth unto] myself, hang on, there is something growing here, a mental force that will astonish everyone even more when things are going well.
But what of the moneylenders, who have corrupted the temple with their venal ways?
Money itself is not guilty; it's what the people do with it that can be bad.
"But what about the money which has arrived in English football whose origins..."
[He cuts in] That is indefensible.
So, Arsene; how shall we live?
Arsenal has a tradition that I like to respect, but Arsenal also has moral qualities for which I feel responsible and which I defend in my team. Everyone has their values that they pass down to the generations that follow. That's why, when there was the Ashley Cole affair [who? Ed.], I wanted someone at Chelsea to explain what their values were. I understand completely that they wanted to nick a player because he is one of the best. But what are their values?
So, thou shalt not steal, then? But is the English game losing its soul?
A little, yes... You used to have a boy who went and stood watching at games, who became a Liverpool fan and who after having succeeded in life, had a dream of buying 'his' club. Things have changed a lot since then.
And why aren't there enough good English players?
I think it's a fundamental problem of quality... It's not normal that a kid coming from South Africa or Braziil is better than those here... Those young English players will be of a good enough quality as soon as I go and see the French under-17s and I say[eth un]to myself, no I'm not going to take that player there, because I have an English boy who is under 17 and as good as him. But one of the beautiful things in sport is being able to say: "why shouldn't a kid who is passionate and talented - and born in Zimbabwe - have the chance to play with the best footballers in the world?" It would be an injustice.
"So morals still come into it?"
Morals always come into it.
There endeth the lesson.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Sunday 30 September 2007
Saturday 29 September 2007
Chess On Grass...
Saturday 29th September, 2007: West Ham 0, Arsenal 1 (van Persie)
It's sometime between 1990 and 1998. Jumpers for goalposts on Twickenham Green. The Skins are three goals up against the Shirts. Or maybe the Shirts are leading the Skins 2-1. No matter, there's a game going on; or at least, there would be if it wasn't for some idiot who has decided to walk his dog diagonally across our (admittedly unmarked) pitch. The game stops while we wait for Skip or Sandy or Towser the labrador to finish doing its business and continue on its way, the field motionless except for hound and owner until eventually, canine bowels voided, poop duly scooped, they are at last trotting across our (admittedly imaginary) touchline and have left the field of play.
The disruption over, Steve, the Skins goalie and the drummer in our band, takes it upon himself to run full pelt across the pitch, shaking a small, goalkeeping-gloved fist at the hapless dog and its anti-social owner as they head to towards the pavement. "Oi, you", he yells out after the thoughtless dog handler, "how would you like it if I came 'round your house, barged into your living room and dumped on your chess board?" A bit harsh, you might think. You can see his point though, can't you? Because that, in effect, is what this bloke's dog has just done. This is, after all, the equivalent of our chess board. We don't just play football, you see; this is chess on grass.
Steve's a West Ham fan, as is Marky Mark. Mark is the tall, lanky one - a taller, more slender Peter Crouch - Steve's about half his height, balding and small handed due to having a set of finger joints missing from both hands. Not exactly ideal for a goalkeeper, but he makes up for this shortcoming through enthusiasm; when he isn't chasing after his wind tossed goalie's cap when he should be keeping goal. Not exactly ideal for a drummer either, but that's another story... That figure ambling along the touchline will be Marky Mark arriving thirty minutes into the game, as insouciant off the pitch as on, a silk cut ultra in one hand and a small bottle of beer in the other. He's a languid player, a joy to watch even though he has no pace. Not much power either, just a good footballing brain. He makes it look easy when he's in the groove.
He and Squeaky Paul exemplify the Twickenham Green ethos; keep the ball on the deck, pass your way out of trouble, play it out from the back. It's not football, you see, it's chess on grass and that's the way we play. We even have a motto, in Latin, like a proper football club; Nonus Shittus Defencus. Roughly translated, it means; stay calm and pass the ball at all times. They'll both be there at what passes for the half time teamtalk, less a talk than an exhausted, extended fag break which may or may not encompass a swig of beer. Marky Mark and Squeaky Paul will spend it bent double, hands on knees, Mark like a construction site crane that has been lowered to half mast, coughing a cough that uproots half a lung. Then it's back on to the board with the all the other knights and pawns and rooks and kings. Set the timer for another 45, another gambit, a few more moves, another game of chess.
Chess on grass. It's a football aesthetic closely identified with today's opponents, West Ham. The club holds a special place in the hearts of many fans of English football and the higher pursuits of the game; if only because of its triumverate of homegrown World Cup winners and famous and longstanding "Academy". West Ham is a club that many followers of the game find hard to dislike. Until, of course they start beating you with any regularity, as they now do Arsenal; home and away in the last campaign and at Highbury the season before as well. The first of last season's wins was at Upton Park (or, as I prefer to call it, The Boleyn Ground). The club's then manager, Alan Pardew celebrated the Hammers' last minute goal as if his side has once again, as its fans will tell you with a smile that they did in 1966, won the World Cup, not just a Premier League game, at home. Fist clenched provocatively under the nose of our French coach, it was as if their earlier verbal jousting about Arsenal's lack of English players had spilled out into the more explicit expression of a familiar form of footballing xenophobia. That of the English football hooligan; not without shirts, these 'skins' have no hair and wear DMs.
But another Irons fan, Russell Brand, is hopefully more representative of his ilk. In today's Guardian, he praises Wenger, 'a mystic, a shaman, an alchemist', 'whose beautiful, more "royal" than ever, Arsenal' are he says, their undoubtedly foreign make up notwithstanding, closer to the spirit of English football than many of their more obviously indigenous opponents. With the sort of magnanimity you can only have when you've won your last three head to heads, Brand says [Wenger] 'could field a team of ravens and be closer to the game's essence than most, and I hope for West Ham's sake that ... he does'.
Sadly for Russell and other fans of the Irons, Wenger resists the obvious temptation to test out the strength of his experimental Corvid XI and makes only two changes from the team that started against Derby; Hleb returning from injury to replace Walcott on the right side of midfield; van Persie back for the injured Eduardo. Alex is on just long enough to provide the cross from which van Persie heads the only goal of the game before limping off, having only just returned from injury for the visit to the East End. He's down injured for what seems from the tortuously protracted radio commentary to be most of the first half. He is replaced by Eboue and almost immediately John Murray and Steve Claridge start to complain that the game has become fractured and fragmented.
They really ought to listen to their own shows a bit more before they start making outrageous judgements like that. The attention of the poor West Ham or Arsenal supporting listener is whisked this way and that, here there and everywhere; from Nantes to Ascot by way of pretty much every football league ground in the country. Anywhere else, it seems, is preferable to staying with the events of the 'featured commentary game' and recounting them as they unfold at the Boleyn Ground. You could get a clearer picture of what was happening on the field of play by reconstructing the action in a game of blindfold shove ha'penny with twenty two identical coins. We get a furlong by furlong account of the closing stages of the Fillies Stake (Listen edges out favourite Proviso to win by a short head), minute by minute updates of Australia's romp against Canada (a game even the most optimistic Canuck will presumably have written off as a likely defeat), although there is, I have to admit, much mirth to be had as Wales fall 25-10 behind Fiji in the Rugby World Cup and Chelsea have Drogba sent off on their way to a dismal 0-0 draw in the West London derby with Fulham.
In the end, as far as I can gather from the stuttering volley of sentences interupted by protracted cutaways to anywhere but Upton Park that passes for 5 Live's coverage, Arsenal hang on to win. That Nonus Shittus Defencus seems to be catching on. The young Arsenal side goes into October on top of the pile on the back of eight straight wins across the board.
If we're looking for an early story to shape the season, it could well be this; it's not about whether you win, so much as it is about how. This argument has already seen off 'The Special One', whose name is sung out by the disenchanted Blues at Stamford Bridge. Aside from the fact that all the fancied teams have already ground out one nil wins, you wonder, if something higher than winning or losing were not perceived to be at stake, might not Mourinho still be there, in his black overcoat, doing just that at the Bridge? Russell Brand frames it nicely, quoting Arsene Wenger's comments about the fans being the soul of the game:
He spoke of fans as "the keepers of the game" which is a further nod to the civic, if not sacred nature of the sport... Amidst the swirl of the scandals, the rumours, the ignoble chatter and limitless tainted money, something chaste and sacred remains and it belongs to us, the fans, and cannot be be bought, sold or branded.
Perhaps he's right. I hope so. But then, it's like we've always said; it's not football. This is chess on grass.
Listen to Part three of The Road to Moscow HERE...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
It's sometime between 1990 and 1998. Jumpers for goalposts on Twickenham Green. The Skins are three goals up against the Shirts. Or maybe the Shirts are leading the Skins 2-1. No matter, there's a game going on; or at least, there would be if it wasn't for some idiot who has decided to walk his dog diagonally across our (admittedly unmarked) pitch. The game stops while we wait for Skip or Sandy or Towser the labrador to finish doing its business and continue on its way, the field motionless except for hound and owner until eventually, canine bowels voided, poop duly scooped, they are at last trotting across our (admittedly imaginary) touchline and have left the field of play.
The disruption over, Steve, the Skins goalie and the drummer in our band, takes it upon himself to run full pelt across the pitch, shaking a small, goalkeeping-gloved fist at the hapless dog and its anti-social owner as they head to towards the pavement. "Oi, you", he yells out after the thoughtless dog handler, "how would you like it if I came 'round your house, barged into your living room and dumped on your chess board?" A bit harsh, you might think. You can see his point though, can't you? Because that, in effect, is what this bloke's dog has just done. This is, after all, the equivalent of our chess board. We don't just play football, you see; this is chess on grass.
Steve's a West Ham fan, as is Marky Mark. Mark is the tall, lanky one - a taller, more slender Peter Crouch - Steve's about half his height, balding and small handed due to having a set of finger joints missing from both hands. Not exactly ideal for a goalkeeper, but he makes up for this shortcoming through enthusiasm; when he isn't chasing after his wind tossed goalie's cap when he should be keeping goal. Not exactly ideal for a drummer either, but that's another story... That figure ambling along the touchline will be Marky Mark arriving thirty minutes into the game, as insouciant off the pitch as on, a silk cut ultra in one hand and a small bottle of beer in the other. He's a languid player, a joy to watch even though he has no pace. Not much power either, just a good footballing brain. He makes it look easy when he's in the groove.
He and Squeaky Paul exemplify the Twickenham Green ethos; keep the ball on the deck, pass your way out of trouble, play it out from the back. It's not football, you see, it's chess on grass and that's the way we play. We even have a motto, in Latin, like a proper football club; Nonus Shittus Defencus. Roughly translated, it means; stay calm and pass the ball at all times. They'll both be there at what passes for the half time teamtalk, less a talk than an exhausted, extended fag break which may or may not encompass a swig of beer. Marky Mark and Squeaky Paul will spend it bent double, hands on knees, Mark like a construction site crane that has been lowered to half mast, coughing a cough that uproots half a lung. Then it's back on to the board with the all the other knights and pawns and rooks and kings. Set the timer for another 45, another gambit, a few more moves, another game of chess.
Chess on grass. It's a football aesthetic closely identified with today's opponents, West Ham. The club holds a special place in the hearts of many fans of English football and the higher pursuits of the game; if only because of its triumverate of homegrown World Cup winners and famous and longstanding "Academy". West Ham is a club that many followers of the game find hard to dislike. Until, of course they start beating you with any regularity, as they now do Arsenal; home and away in the last campaign and at Highbury the season before as well. The first of last season's wins was at Upton Park (or, as I prefer to call it, The Boleyn Ground). The club's then manager, Alan Pardew celebrated the Hammers' last minute goal as if his side has once again, as its fans will tell you with a smile that they did in 1966, won the World Cup, not just a Premier League game, at home. Fist clenched provocatively under the nose of our French coach, it was as if their earlier verbal jousting about Arsenal's lack of English players had spilled out into the more explicit expression of a familiar form of footballing xenophobia. That of the English football hooligan; not without shirts, these 'skins' have no hair and wear DMs.
But another Irons fan, Russell Brand, is hopefully more representative of his ilk. In today's Guardian, he praises Wenger, 'a mystic, a shaman, an alchemist', 'whose beautiful, more "royal" than ever, Arsenal' are he says, their undoubtedly foreign make up notwithstanding, closer to the spirit of English football than many of their more obviously indigenous opponents. With the sort of magnanimity you can only have when you've won your last three head to heads, Brand says [Wenger] 'could field a team of ravens and be closer to the game's essence than most, and I hope for West Ham's sake that ... he does'.
Sadly for Russell and other fans of the Irons, Wenger resists the obvious temptation to test out the strength of his experimental Corvid XI and makes only two changes from the team that started against Derby; Hleb returning from injury to replace Walcott on the right side of midfield; van Persie back for the injured Eduardo. Alex is on just long enough to provide the cross from which van Persie heads the only goal of the game before limping off, having only just returned from injury for the visit to the East End. He's down injured for what seems from the tortuously protracted radio commentary to be most of the first half. He is replaced by Eboue and almost immediately John Murray and Steve Claridge start to complain that the game has become fractured and fragmented.
They really ought to listen to their own shows a bit more before they start making outrageous judgements like that. The attention of the poor West Ham or Arsenal supporting listener is whisked this way and that, here there and everywhere; from Nantes to Ascot by way of pretty much every football league ground in the country. Anywhere else, it seems, is preferable to staying with the events of the 'featured commentary game' and recounting them as they unfold at the Boleyn Ground. You could get a clearer picture of what was happening on the field of play by reconstructing the action in a game of blindfold shove ha'penny with twenty two identical coins. We get a furlong by furlong account of the closing stages of the Fillies Stake (Listen edges out favourite Proviso to win by a short head), minute by minute updates of Australia's romp against Canada (a game even the most optimistic Canuck will presumably have written off as a likely defeat), although there is, I have to admit, much mirth to be had as Wales fall 25-10 behind Fiji in the Rugby World Cup and Chelsea have Drogba sent off on their way to a dismal 0-0 draw in the West London derby with Fulham.
In the end, as far as I can gather from the stuttering volley of sentences interupted by protracted cutaways to anywhere but Upton Park that passes for 5 Live's coverage, Arsenal hang on to win. That Nonus Shittus Defencus seems to be catching on. The young Arsenal side goes into October on top of the pile on the back of eight straight wins across the board.
If we're looking for an early story to shape the season, it could well be this; it's not about whether you win, so much as it is about how. This argument has already seen off 'The Special One', whose name is sung out by the disenchanted Blues at Stamford Bridge. Aside from the fact that all the fancied teams have already ground out one nil wins, you wonder, if something higher than winning or losing were not perceived to be at stake, might not Mourinho still be there, in his black overcoat, doing just that at the Bridge? Russell Brand frames it nicely, quoting Arsene Wenger's comments about the fans being the soul of the game:
He spoke of fans as "the keepers of the game" which is a further nod to the civic, if not sacred nature of the sport... Amidst the swirl of the scandals, the rumours, the ignoble chatter and limitless tainted money, something chaste and sacred remains and it belongs to us, the fans, and cannot be be bought, sold or branded.
Perhaps he's right. I hope so. But then, it's like we've always said; it's not football. This is chess on grass.
Listen to Part three of The Road to Moscow HERE...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Friday 28 September 2007
Road to Moscow Podcast...
...hear Bob slur his way through part two of his work-in-progress here...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Gawd Bless You Gooner!!...
I'd just like to thank those splendid chaps in red and white over at The Online Gooner who have been kind enough to put up a link to The Robert Swipe Show which appears to have immediately trebled our readership. So in return, I'd like to refer those three readers back to the blog review page over at that most estimable publication itself and, in a spirit of karmic good spiritedness, ask anyone else who may come along to have a look (as I will) at the other blogs they have singled out as being 'best of breed':
The Gooner Eye
Gooner's Diary
Any new readers may want to have a listen to The Road to Moscow part one, in which I read out very badly a few of these here blog posts that you can probably read a lot more quickly (and eloquently) yourselves...
Thank you gooners everywhere!!
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
The Gooner Eye
Gooner's Diary
Any new readers may want to have a listen to The Road to Moscow part one, in which I read out very badly a few of these here blog posts that you can probably read a lot more quickly (and eloquently) yourselves...
Thank you gooners everywhere!!
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Belle, Book and Candle...
I must have been ill. I'm so evidently flu-engulfed that I get sent home from work early. I'm thus denied the pleasure of spreading my germs at large throughout the ranks of the new student intake who, when they're not stabbing one another, have begun to shuffle listlessly around the campus in a manner more befitting old wretches on death row than young people in the prime of life and on the cusp of a brilliant academic career. Which is excellent because it means I can watch Billie Piper in Confessions of a Call Girl as it is screened and am thus spared the temptation of spending all of today wanking over it when I could be doing something really indulgent and aimed solely at my own self-pleasuring. Like writing.
As with most things that we men work ourselves up into a teeth-gritting, grunt-festooned triumphalist fever over before being overtaken by humiliating feelings of inferiority and worthlessness (but I'm sure Geoff will be doing his own preview of the West Ham v. Arsenal game), ITV2's adaptation Belle de Jour doesn't quite live up to the billing. It's not all Billie Piper's fault, to be fair. She looks lovely; silky, wavy hair that you'd give your signed 1980 Cup Winner's Cup final programme to have wrapped around your gonads. And, whether being eased out of her jeans or all kitted out in her 'professional' get up with all the trimmings we get to see plenty of her being fucked. Surprisingly for a fetishist, man and boy, like myself, it's when she's dressed in the former, playing the girl next door being intimately fucked and not when she's cavorting on top of a chap wearing a saddle (that's Belle cavorting on the saddle, by the way, not the chap - what do you think I am? Some kind of PERVERT???) that provides the programme's most genuinely arousing moment.
The problem is, she's just not Belle:
On the way to the meeting point, I passed a poster for Intolerable Cruelty and managed to convince myself that I looked not unlike Catherine Zeta-Jones.
But it's not so much that she's a brunette or looks like one sexy young actress a bit more than she does another. In the same way that the irritating Bristolian whimpering of Martina Topless Bird (or whatevah) on the soundtrack is preferred to (for instance) Al Green's sublime 'Belle' (itself a meditation on the conflicting lures of the sexual and the spiritual), like the programme's makers, Billie just doesn't radiate the maturity and been-there-seen-it-done-it-had-it-inserted-into-me-and-mopped-it-up-with-the-t-shirt knowingness of Belle's literary voice. Billie has the youthful good looks and general well-turned out, 'I'd give her one'-ness a high class call girl would need, but she just doesn't seem for real, man. She's a fine actress, don't get me wrong, but she's been mis-cast in this. Even Cherie Lunghi, who performs the role of Belle's agent d'un certain age here with just the right mix of playfulness and coldheartedness, would have been a more plausible choice.
But perhaps the problem is more deeply rooted. In my view, Belle de Jour worked, first and foremost, because it was a blog. You can tell a lot about blogs from their opening few words. Some just pitch you into the middle of the author's tedious existence and hope for the best:
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.
Others provide a more seemly opening before pitching you into the middle of the author's tedious existence and hoping for the best:
In analogue times, people who were slightly drunk and at a loose end might begin writing bad poetry, or stand on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner, or just phone the speaking clock and scream obscenities at it.
Whereas some have quite clearly been designed to have legs beyond that initial post, their beginnings like that of a novel, hold the seeds of the story that will sprout like a mighty oak out of this taut and pithy kernel:
I spent my mid-twenties merrily gallivanting around the world without a care in the world, having a ball. I was on some Thai island paradise one day with a gaggle of fellow 20something raucous females, when I declared flippantly,
"Oh, I'll probably be in my thirties saying 'I haven't had a boyfriend since I was 23'..."
But they all have one thing in common, no matter how literary or contrived they may seem. You assume that you are on the receiving end of a singular voice, a unique experience. It's just like a novel, in many respects, only you can hear this, see how it's been updated, read it almost in real time, every single day. You can find out how its author has been and what they might do tomorrow. Or they might just tell you who they wanked over or what they watched on TV. And so it was with BdJ:
Located what sounded like an excellent, small, discreet agency (word of mouth, as they say). After email contact and sending my photos, I finally arranged to meet the manager at the dining room of a central London hotel. She sounded very young and had a very strong Eastern European accent. Polish, maybe? Should I ask? Oy vey.
It is very literary, even then, looking back at that very first post. It's crying out to be read on, to be continued; to be published as a book, even. But for all that literariness, it's very real in the way that all blogs come across as being 'real' - in other words, I suppose, as the unmediated product of an individual consciousness. I still think BdJ worked best on that other small screen. For me, much of the power of the writing came from its central conceit (somewhat lost in book and televised form, in my view) that this was a blog, written by (as so often they are) a blogger.
As such, and as much as her erotic encounters entertain, we also get to see a very vivid and personal London filled with very real Londoners and the ordinary minutiae of life through the eyes of the anonymous Belle. She's sat there, as we are, on the tube, only she is probably being eyed up by a potential assaulter. She may inhabit a very different professional world from our own, but she lives in the same one that we do and it is beautifully evoked. And that's why material that might otherwise have seemed like made-to-measure smut is able to transcend the genre and become quite a powerful piece of subversion. Because the insinuation returns with every post that this could be anyone. And so, the logic sits up, pert-breasted and fiddles with its short cut skirt, anyone could be Belle.
This universality is, of course, lost in the adaptation. I've not read the book, but it strikes me that the published form would also strip the work of that initial destabilising intent. We forget, I suppose, that this is an artform in its infancy. I'm doing some research on Daniel Defoe at the moment, and it's interesting how much stick he was on the receiving end of. Novels like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, based as they were on personal accounts of castaways and the Belle de Jour of her day, were deemed to be the work of a scandalous charlatan; Defoe was a literary freakshow proprietor who was happy to earn his coin relating and embellishing the misfortunes of others. And yet where would the novel be without Defoe? Blogs may well become one day what novels were to Defoe's time. When was the last time I read a novel that was, well, novel? And yet one is surrounded by novelty on the blogosphere. One day, perhaps, we'll be as happy to subscribe to read the author of Belle's newest work as we are now to hand over our readies for a paperback. This will no doubt come across as the embittered ranting of someone who knows he will never be published (which, to be fair, is only to be expected) but I, for one, can't wait.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Sunday 23 September 2007
Sing When You're Winning...
Saturday 22nd Sepetember, 2007: Arsenal 5 (Diaby, Adebayor 3 [1 pen], Fabregas), Derby County 0.
I'm queuing for a beer in the Auld Triangle, trying to ride the wave of bodies to the bar, when something on the dark wood dresser at its rear catches my eye. There, stood side on amongst the old Guinness bottles, period toucan statuettes and Irish nick-nackery, is a 12 inch vinyl album; Natty Dread by Bob Marley & the Wailers. As I edge closer, I can see that its sleeve has been covered in silver scrawl by a variety of hands. I get within elbow resting reach of the pumps and catch the young barmaid's eye to order up my Stella. As she's pouring it, I ask her if the signatures on the album cover are those of Bob and the Wailers themselves. She doesn't reply, just gives a private, knowing smile, so I'm left none the wiser. But something is welling up inside me as I pocket my change and take my pint outside; as if I've been let in on an in-joke, made privvy to the craik. It's as if her silence is saying, 'believe whatever you want to, love'. And I suppose I already do, imagining as I am those languid Caribbean signatories obliging a request made in this dark, north London pub in '77 when Bob and the band lived over here and probably popped up this way to see a game. It's a nice feeling, so why let an inconvenient truth spoil it? Better, surely, to be like this; soothed, uplifted and feeling as warm inside as the day.
And what a glorious day it is. The sun bears down upon my forehead as I squat to read my programme. The sky above the tidy terraces oppposite the pub is mediterranean, any clouds that interupt its Victoria line blue are fluffy, white, high and friendly. The sunny street is a carnival of red and white, yellow and blue. The ladies are out in force in their summery, feminised replica tops; the white sleeves of the male variety all but dispensed with in favour of armpit hugging isosceles, the whole cut is more petite. No handbags at their feet, instead they slow dance around the odd unnecessary fleece and a triangle of empty bottles and a half drunk Smirnoff Ice. It feels more like an August Bank Holiday than a late September day, as the heat sets tiny trickles of sweat rolling down my sunscreened neck. All in all, the perfect day to buy myself a woolly Arsenal scarf.
Bob's 'lucky' woolly Arsenal scarf; or Gerald, as its more usually known...
I'd seen them being twirled and twizzled by the Red Action wedge on the opposite side of the ground from me during the Sevilla game and had to have one. Red Action are trying to get a bit more atmosphere going at the new ground but the problem with the lack of noise predates the Emirates. They didn't call our old ground the Highbury Library for nothing. But today there seems to be a different buzz. Perhaps it's just the afterglow of the win at Tottenham or down to the encouraging display in midweek. It could be the effect of Matt Lucas's comic guide to defending the Arsenal way that has us chortling when they show it on the big screen. Or maybe the crowd knows with a certainty deep down in their bones that we'll beat Derby today, and that it's just a matter of by how many. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, there's a newly appreciative response to 'The Wonder of You' that makes me think it might eventually catch on; I hope so, but I still can't imagine too many people singing along. I sing along anyway, spirit and voice bouyed by two quickly-downed beers and the cheesey grandiosity of the King.
So the day starts well and just keeps getting better. First Diaby scores - that's right, the same tall framed Diaby who blasted against the bar at the Lane last weekend and haplessly missed a sitter at Cardiff that might have won us the Carling Cup earlier this year. He jinks past two defenders before unwinding a curling shot of such certainty that it comes as more of a surprise to the Arsenal fans than the petrified Derby defence. Then Adebayor breaks through the centre from a clipped Fabregas ball, rounds the keeper and slots home. Fabregas puts Walcott through on goal with an unbelievably astute first time pass out of nowhere that deserves a goal that the youngster can't supply.
The second half opens with a tug on Eduardo (formerly the striker formerly known as Prince, now Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta) inside the Derby penalty area. Adebayor slots it home. Then, with Denilson warming up on the touchline to replace him, it's almost as if Fabregas realises that if he's going to score today, he'll have to do so pretty damn quick. So, naturally, he does, despatching another blasted shot that perhaps may not have beaten a better keeper, but is venomous enough to have poor Stephen Bywater grasping at thin air. It's then left to Adebayor to seal his hatrick with a marvellously athletic leap to bring a high crossfield ball down on the edge of the area. This initial controlling of the ball is improbable enough without his having been tugged at by the black bandana wearing Leacock, but Ade isn't done yet, regaining his poise then showing icy coolness to wait his moment before slotting the ball home imperiously for five-nil.
The crowd, those of us who stay, are starting to applaud the huddle now; the players expression of their togetherness works in synergy with our appreciation of it to fill the stadium with a proud, expectant hum. The word is spreading, we're all starting to believe a bit now. Especially as we hear the news come through, as the hopeful, faithful throng descends the staircase, that Liverpool can only draw nil-nil at home to Birmingham. "We are top of the league, say we are top of the league" they chant. And we are; three points clear with a game in hand.
I decide to make my way to Block 31 for the Arsenal Extra Time event. Depending upon your degree of cynicism towards the modern game, the extension of the match day schedule beyond the final whistle is either an inspired means of simultaneously spreading the dispersal of over 60,000 fans away from the ground whilst allowing the fans to enjoy a cheap, post match beer or another means of screwing every last penny out of us. I take my £2.50 pint of watery Fosters and stand a few yards back from the stage. Two young lads are doing a karaoke version of that Kaiser Chiefs song about someone called Ruby. Rapt by the autocued lyrics, they begin in a nervous shuffle but grow into increasing show offs, mumbling their way through the verses only to burst into a series of loudly bellowed Ur-rubyrubyrubyrub-ays which, for all their enthusiasm, remain tangential to the actual tune of the song in all aspects aside from its metre. Next up is Bob (Phill Jupitus on the third day of a hunger strike) who implores us to sing "Oh Arsenal" in the whoah-whoh-woah bits of 'The Wonder of You' before proceeding to do a superb impersonation of a completely tone deaf Elvis Presley, gargling.
Bob is followed by Gooner Jim who come on with all the finger pointing, hand shucking confidence of Finsbury Park's own Eminem only for a broken microphone to somewhat reduce the impact of the opening verse of 'Ziggy Stardust'. A real trooper, he soldiers on unheard, at last becoming audible somewhere around the "screwed up eyes and screw down hair-do" mark, before doing something quite clever with the lyrics, changing "became the special man" into a Jose Mourinho, "special one" jibe. Again, I find myself singing along, even going so far as to join in with a despairing, high-pitched "no-oh" after the "when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band" line. All in all, Gooner Jim is bang on the money with his impersonation of Phil Cornwell impersonating David Bowie in Stellar Street.
Then, as if by way of a skewed tribute to The Special One, we get a blast of Bryan Adams' "The Summer of '69". Jose is, by all accounts, a big fan of Mr. Adams, though he is thought to be more of a Phil Collins man if you believe Zoe Williams, whose excellent rise and fall piece in Saturdays Grauniad nicely encapsulates our love-hate relationship with the - these are nice words to be typing - former Chelsea boss. But the song has another significance. That year saw the debut for Arsenal of a very special player. As you'll have guessed, there had to be some very special reason for me staying on through this karaoke/mullet-clad stadium rock hell. And just as I'm about to give up on the whole thing, out comes the man we've all been waiting for; Charlie George.
He's a well chosen Arsenal legend for this fixture (even if the programme is advertising an appearance by, of all people, Perry Groves...) But even though he also played for today's opponents, Derby County, Charlie really is Arsenal through and through. You couldn't really sum up the player I really only recall from that one often replayed strike at Wembley in a million words. But two words will do just nicely for the man on stage before me who, as he is now, could be a fairly anonymous clerical worker after one too many sherbets reluctantly accepting a long-service award at the works' Christmas do; diamond geezer.
He plays the room with the same cockiness that I remember from those 70s highlights shows, hamming up a feigned impatience as the gooners in the room go through the repertoire of terrace chants he's set them up for, with a put-it-on-a-plate-for-you assist; "there's only one Dennis Bergkamp" ... "Oh Rocky Rocky, Rocky Rocky Rocky Rocky Rocastle" ... "shit club, no history". You can almost believe the myth Nick Hornby crystalised in Fever Pitch that Charlie vaulted over the low white wall that separated his patch on the North Bank directly on to the Highbury pitch.
He goes through his stock Arsenal Legends after dinner speech patter. How did they celebrate the 1971 Cup final? Brandy and champagne, but Charlie - this said with a straightface - never touched a drop, of course. His all-time favourite Arsenal player? Bergkamp, who else? There's a gag about the Chelsea groundsman winning the pitch of the year award; "hardly surprising, it has had all that crap on it all year". Asked about the famous '71 celebration, he still can't exactly tell us why he did it. He'd done the same thing in an earlier round, at Maine Road on a damp Manchester night, lying down in the mud just as he would again on final day at Wembley on that glorious summer day, luxuriating like a prince in a bath made from gold.
He knows the ebbs and the flows of the fans, would still rather, you feel, be here with us, joining in with the singing not signing programmes for the kids and orchestrating our chanting from the elevation of the stage. But in a way, he is with us now, just as he is with us in the cheap seats and not the corporate bores he's asked to turn up and tell his tales for in the swanky corporate zone; he's with us in his heart as he has been since he was a kid; dancing and clapping with us in the rhythm that we found after the fifth. Charlie George is dancing with us and not the money men, clapping along to the same silent groove that makes the young hip blade a few seats down the line from me swing and sway, clapping and swaying in his 70s throwback t-shirt and a scarf the same as mine; we swing and sway; clap and sway, sing and sway and clap and say; "we love you Arsenal, we do ... we love you Arsenal, we do...we love you Arsenal we do - oh Arsenal we love you!"
And then, as the Q & A comes to an end, there's a quiz to win a mobile phone; "who scored the winning goal for Arsenal in the 1970 Fairs Cup?" I don't know the answer but I do notice a beguiling, bob-haired brunette standing aloof at the side of the stage. She has one of those faces that you can't help but stare at; an elfin Colleen who seems somehow to be above and beyond the fray. My gaze returns to Charlie, about to hand over the prize. A bulky blond haired guy in his mid-to-late forties gets the answer right; Jon Sammels scored the goal that won us our first-ever European trophy. Charlie hands over the phone then grabs the winner's hand and holds it up. The guy who won the prize only has three fingers and a thumb on one hand. "I didn't tell you he was me brother, did I?" Charlie laughs and barks, then holds up his own right hand for all to see. He must be double jointed or this is some skilful sleight of hand because Charlie's index finger is missing too. But no, it's true. I looked it up, not believing my own eyes, still rubbing them in disbelief like a shell shocked Ray Clemence, as that ball cannoned down from the back of the Wembley net. And with that, like some Medicine Show charlatan, he's whisked off into the early evening breeze a cordon of stewards around him and a bob-haired Colleen at his side.
"Whatever happened to Charlie George?"
Passing Chelsea Harbour on the train back home, a huge expanse of low, grey cloud covers west London. Its edge is traced out like a border by a line of brilliant gold that hovers just above the horizon, the displaced light of the steady setting sun. Your day is nearly done. You recall the hopeful sunny skies you've not long left behind; the songs and the goals. And Charlie George and his three fingered hand. Make the most of this, you think; sing when you're winning. Because it won't last long. Sing now, because there's another week before you'll sing again; another week to be filled with the usual frustrations, of things you'll do that you do not want to be doing; the ongoing despair. You can only sing when you're winning.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
I'm queuing for a beer in the Auld Triangle, trying to ride the wave of bodies to the bar, when something on the dark wood dresser at its rear catches my eye. There, stood side on amongst the old Guinness bottles, period toucan statuettes and Irish nick-nackery, is a 12 inch vinyl album; Natty Dread by Bob Marley & the Wailers. As I edge closer, I can see that its sleeve has been covered in silver scrawl by a variety of hands. I get within elbow resting reach of the pumps and catch the young barmaid's eye to order up my Stella. As she's pouring it, I ask her if the signatures on the album cover are those of Bob and the Wailers themselves. She doesn't reply, just gives a private, knowing smile, so I'm left none the wiser. But something is welling up inside me as I pocket my change and take my pint outside; as if I've been let in on an in-joke, made privvy to the craik. It's as if her silence is saying, 'believe whatever you want to, love'. And I suppose I already do, imagining as I am those languid Caribbean signatories obliging a request made in this dark, north London pub in '77 when Bob and the band lived over here and probably popped up this way to see a game. It's a nice feeling, so why let an inconvenient truth spoil it? Better, surely, to be like this; soothed, uplifted and feeling as warm inside as the day.
And what a glorious day it is. The sun bears down upon my forehead as I squat to read my programme. The sky above the tidy terraces oppposite the pub is mediterranean, any clouds that interupt its Victoria line blue are fluffy, white, high and friendly. The sunny street is a carnival of red and white, yellow and blue. The ladies are out in force in their summery, feminised replica tops; the white sleeves of the male variety all but dispensed with in favour of armpit hugging isosceles, the whole cut is more petite. No handbags at their feet, instead they slow dance around the odd unnecessary fleece and a triangle of empty bottles and a half drunk Smirnoff Ice. It feels more like an August Bank Holiday than a late September day, as the heat sets tiny trickles of sweat rolling down my sunscreened neck. All in all, the perfect day to buy myself a woolly Arsenal scarf.
Bob's 'lucky' woolly Arsenal scarf; or Gerald, as its more usually known...
I'd seen them being twirled and twizzled by the Red Action wedge on the opposite side of the ground from me during the Sevilla game and had to have one. Red Action are trying to get a bit more atmosphere going at the new ground but the problem with the lack of noise predates the Emirates. They didn't call our old ground the Highbury Library for nothing. But today there seems to be a different buzz. Perhaps it's just the afterglow of the win at Tottenham or down to the encouraging display in midweek. It could be the effect of Matt Lucas's comic guide to defending the Arsenal way that has us chortling when they show it on the big screen. Or maybe the crowd knows with a certainty deep down in their bones that we'll beat Derby today, and that it's just a matter of by how many. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, there's a newly appreciative response to 'The Wonder of You' that makes me think it might eventually catch on; I hope so, but I still can't imagine too many people singing along. I sing along anyway, spirit and voice bouyed by two quickly-downed beers and the cheesey grandiosity of the King.
So the day starts well and just keeps getting better. First Diaby scores - that's right, the same tall framed Diaby who blasted against the bar at the Lane last weekend and haplessly missed a sitter at Cardiff that might have won us the Carling Cup earlier this year. He jinks past two defenders before unwinding a curling shot of such certainty that it comes as more of a surprise to the Arsenal fans than the petrified Derby defence. Then Adebayor breaks through the centre from a clipped Fabregas ball, rounds the keeper and slots home. Fabregas puts Walcott through on goal with an unbelievably astute first time pass out of nowhere that deserves a goal that the youngster can't supply.
The second half opens with a tug on Eduardo (formerly the striker formerly known as Prince, now Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta) inside the Derby penalty area. Adebayor slots it home. Then, with Denilson warming up on the touchline to replace him, it's almost as if Fabregas realises that if he's going to score today, he'll have to do so pretty damn quick. So, naturally, he does, despatching another blasted shot that perhaps may not have beaten a better keeper, but is venomous enough to have poor Stephen Bywater grasping at thin air. It's then left to Adebayor to seal his hatrick with a marvellously athletic leap to bring a high crossfield ball down on the edge of the area. This initial controlling of the ball is improbable enough without his having been tugged at by the black bandana wearing Leacock, but Ade isn't done yet, regaining his poise then showing icy coolness to wait his moment before slotting the ball home imperiously for five-nil.
The crowd, those of us who stay, are starting to applaud the huddle now; the players expression of their togetherness works in synergy with our appreciation of it to fill the stadium with a proud, expectant hum. The word is spreading, we're all starting to believe a bit now. Especially as we hear the news come through, as the hopeful, faithful throng descends the staircase, that Liverpool can only draw nil-nil at home to Birmingham. "We are top of the league, say we are top of the league" they chant. And we are; three points clear with a game in hand.
I decide to make my way to Block 31 for the Arsenal Extra Time event. Depending upon your degree of cynicism towards the modern game, the extension of the match day schedule beyond the final whistle is either an inspired means of simultaneously spreading the dispersal of over 60,000 fans away from the ground whilst allowing the fans to enjoy a cheap, post match beer or another means of screwing every last penny out of us. I take my £2.50 pint of watery Fosters and stand a few yards back from the stage. Two young lads are doing a karaoke version of that Kaiser Chiefs song about someone called Ruby. Rapt by the autocued lyrics, they begin in a nervous shuffle but grow into increasing show offs, mumbling their way through the verses only to burst into a series of loudly bellowed Ur-rubyrubyrubyrub-ays which, for all their enthusiasm, remain tangential to the actual tune of the song in all aspects aside from its metre. Next up is Bob (Phill Jupitus on the third day of a hunger strike) who implores us to sing "Oh Arsenal" in the whoah-whoh-woah bits of 'The Wonder of You' before proceeding to do a superb impersonation of a completely tone deaf Elvis Presley, gargling.
Bob is followed by Gooner Jim who come on with all the finger pointing, hand shucking confidence of Finsbury Park's own Eminem only for a broken microphone to somewhat reduce the impact of the opening verse of 'Ziggy Stardust'. A real trooper, he soldiers on unheard, at last becoming audible somewhere around the "screwed up eyes and screw down hair-do" mark, before doing something quite clever with the lyrics, changing "became the special man" into a Jose Mourinho, "special one" jibe. Again, I find myself singing along, even going so far as to join in with a despairing, high-pitched "no-oh" after the "when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band" line. All in all, Gooner Jim is bang on the money with his impersonation of Phil Cornwell impersonating David Bowie in Stellar Street.
Then, as if by way of a skewed tribute to The Special One, we get a blast of Bryan Adams' "The Summer of '69". Jose is, by all accounts, a big fan of Mr. Adams, though he is thought to be more of a Phil Collins man if you believe Zoe Williams, whose excellent rise and fall piece in Saturdays Grauniad nicely encapsulates our love-hate relationship with the - these are nice words to be typing - former Chelsea boss. But the song has another significance. That year saw the debut for Arsenal of a very special player. As you'll have guessed, there had to be some very special reason for me staying on through this karaoke/mullet-clad stadium rock hell. And just as I'm about to give up on the whole thing, out comes the man we've all been waiting for; Charlie George.
He's a well chosen Arsenal legend for this fixture (even if the programme is advertising an appearance by, of all people, Perry Groves...) But even though he also played for today's opponents, Derby County, Charlie really is Arsenal through and through. You couldn't really sum up the player I really only recall from that one often replayed strike at Wembley in a million words. But two words will do just nicely for the man on stage before me who, as he is now, could be a fairly anonymous clerical worker after one too many sherbets reluctantly accepting a long-service award at the works' Christmas do; diamond geezer.
He plays the room with the same cockiness that I remember from those 70s highlights shows, hamming up a feigned impatience as the gooners in the room go through the repertoire of terrace chants he's set them up for, with a put-it-on-a-plate-for-you assist; "there's only one Dennis Bergkamp" ... "Oh Rocky Rocky, Rocky Rocky Rocky Rocky Rocastle" ... "shit club, no history". You can almost believe the myth Nick Hornby crystalised in Fever Pitch that Charlie vaulted over the low white wall that separated his patch on the North Bank directly on to the Highbury pitch.
He goes through his stock Arsenal Legends after dinner speech patter. How did they celebrate the 1971 Cup final? Brandy and champagne, but Charlie - this said with a straightface - never touched a drop, of course. His all-time favourite Arsenal player? Bergkamp, who else? There's a gag about the Chelsea groundsman winning the pitch of the year award; "hardly surprising, it has had all that crap on it all year". Asked about the famous '71 celebration, he still can't exactly tell us why he did it. He'd done the same thing in an earlier round, at Maine Road on a damp Manchester night, lying down in the mud just as he would again on final day at Wembley on that glorious summer day, luxuriating like a prince in a bath made from gold.
He knows the ebbs and the flows of the fans, would still rather, you feel, be here with us, joining in with the singing not signing programmes for the kids and orchestrating our chanting from the elevation of the stage. But in a way, he is with us now, just as he is with us in the cheap seats and not the corporate bores he's asked to turn up and tell his tales for in the swanky corporate zone; he's with us in his heart as he has been since he was a kid; dancing and clapping with us in the rhythm that we found after the fifth. Charlie George is dancing with us and not the money men, clapping along to the same silent groove that makes the young hip blade a few seats down the line from me swing and sway, clapping and swaying in his 70s throwback t-shirt and a scarf the same as mine; we swing and sway; clap and sway, sing and sway and clap and say; "we love you Arsenal, we do ... we love you Arsenal, we do...we love you Arsenal we do - oh Arsenal we love you!"
And then, as the Q & A comes to an end, there's a quiz to win a mobile phone; "who scored the winning goal for Arsenal in the 1970 Fairs Cup?" I don't know the answer but I do notice a beguiling, bob-haired brunette standing aloof at the side of the stage. She has one of those faces that you can't help but stare at; an elfin Colleen who seems somehow to be above and beyond the fray. My gaze returns to Charlie, about to hand over the prize. A bulky blond haired guy in his mid-to-late forties gets the answer right; Jon Sammels scored the goal that won us our first-ever European trophy. Charlie hands over the phone then grabs the winner's hand and holds it up. The guy who won the prize only has three fingers and a thumb on one hand. "I didn't tell you he was me brother, did I?" Charlie laughs and barks, then holds up his own right hand for all to see. He must be double jointed or this is some skilful sleight of hand because Charlie's index finger is missing too. But no, it's true. I looked it up, not believing my own eyes, still rubbing them in disbelief like a shell shocked Ray Clemence, as that ball cannoned down from the back of the Wembley net. And with that, like some Medicine Show charlatan, he's whisked off into the early evening breeze a cordon of stewards around him and a bob-haired Colleen at his side.
"Whatever happened to Charlie George?"
Passing Chelsea Harbour on the train back home, a huge expanse of low, grey cloud covers west London. Its edge is traced out like a border by a line of brilliant gold that hovers just above the horizon, the displaced light of the steady setting sun. Your day is nearly done. You recall the hopeful sunny skies you've not long left behind; the songs and the goals. And Charlie George and his three fingered hand. Make the most of this, you think; sing when you're winning. Because it won't last long. Sing now, because there's another week before you'll sing again; another week to be filled with the usual frustrations, of things you'll do that you do not want to be doing; the ongoing despair. You can only sing when you're winning.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Friday 21 September 2007
Terry & June...
Terry was by some way the most observant of the group, so it was hardly surprising that he should be the first to catch sight of the new arrival. He'd looked up idly from removing a small creepy-crawly - possibly a flea, but if so a particularly sizeable one - from the thick fur around his clavicle, and was just about to put it in his mouth when there she was; June. Some sight she was too, lolloping towards the camp with a feline roll of her haunches, the sun glinting off the small translucent pebbles she wore before her eyes. The odd spikes that grew from the heels of her feet cantilevered her insteps to the extent that they were almost perpendicular. This feat of foot engineering, allied to the long swathe of material that she had wrapped around her thighs so tightly that it caused her knees to knock together with each step, gave her the appearance of being preternaturally tall; a female crane gawky, yet somehow still elegant. For there was no doubt this was a she.
Despite the best efforts of an identically shaded though more ornately fitted wrap as that she wore around her waist, there was no disguising the mammalian swelling of her chest. Indeed, distorting her as it did, reining in the flesh of her arms, pinching in her waist to a most painful degree whilst simultaneously hoiking her breasts skyward in a most comical fashion, though her apparel hid the milky fleshiness of her furless skin, her hirsute admirer was left in little doubt that here was, indeed, a woman.
There is no documentary evidence, of course, that Terry was recognised by others, or indeed himself, as being the bearer of that name. Grunts, rather than words were the lingua franca of the small group of chimpanzees of which he was a member and with whom he tended to hang around, tenderly preening and patting or being preened and patted by his colleagues in apehood, when they weren't squabbling or sleeping or engaging in acts of occasionally successful procreation. Terry was the name assigned to him by whomsoever came across the remains of the small group of hunter-gatherers and thus, sadly, we will never really know the exact nature of whatever whimsicality of mind it was that guided their selection. June, on the other hand, we can safely assume to have been named after the calendar month, such nomenclature being a fairly common occurence in the field of anthropology; though whether the name suggests the month of the initial sighting of that first protrusion of her petrified bones or that of their final exhumation, we cannot be entirely sure. Archaeology is, after all, a painfully slow and inexact science.
What we can infer is that at some point after June first lowered her spectacles an inch to establish unmediated eye contact between them, Terry, following the pre-programmed impulses of his hormones and, no doubt, some deeper, cellular instinct to further his and the species' line, would have sensed the loose genetic compatability that existed between himself and June and acted accordingly. The most historically divergent aspect of this coupling - aside from June being arguably the first person to engage in sexual intercourse whilst wearing glasses - would have been the novelty such an enticingly wrapped sexual partner would have held for a traditionally unfussy procreator as Terry. [A note on June's appearance for the contemporary reader might be judicious at this point. She looked and was dressed, we can say, with the benefit of a hindsight and knowledge of cinematic history not available to our simian forebear, not unlike the film star Jean Harlow.]
Blessed with similarly opposable thumbs and a shared fondness for the tactile as his female accomplice, Terry would have wasted little time rolling the taut material up over her rear, to reveal the watchlike intricacies of her nether corsetry. Releasing her bunned hair, which might have appeared to him like a sun-bleached stone attached to her crown, her partner replaced the grip of the hair pins with that of his own fist, riding the bucking of her hips, perhaps peeling back his lips against the afternoon sun to form an approximation of a smile. We can only guess how long Terry would have held June in this fashion before ambling away with a four limbed bounce, his need to be conjoined with her sated and his function complete.
For June, of course, a new coupling had commenced, a small matter of hours after her final coital shriek. For the first few months, there was no real discernable change in her demeanour; her wrappings warmed her through the days of the dimming sun, and soon she was absorbed into the rhythms of the group, preening and being preened, scavenging with them, sleeping with them. But the changes did come and soon June swelled. No longer acquiescent to their advances, savagery gave way, ultimately, to sulleness as, one by one, her suitors were repelled. Now merely tolerated at best, her presence cast a shadow on the tribe. But then, alone outside the confines of the camp, there was heard another shriek; this time an infant's wail joining hers in a happy, if discordant, harmony. Panting, cooing, moaning, June's teeth hacked at the umbilical chord. She wiped a wrist across her lips, daubing a smear of placental blood along her arm. Panting, smiling, and now, finally, giggling like a much younger girl, she cups them in her palm. "A man!" she whispers, her eyes welling up and wide. "I've given birth to a man."
And so, with time, he proves to be. June's son grows up to be a particularly fine man. She watches as he grows, delighting as the summer sun frosts the hairs on his arms as pale as straw, his body tanning, becoming ever more supple and strong as he grows. Bigger, taller as each winter fades, at last he stands before her. A man, her son. Her son, a man. At last she thinks, my son becomes a man. A man to make a mother proud. A man without fur.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Despite the best efforts of an identically shaded though more ornately fitted wrap as that she wore around her waist, there was no disguising the mammalian swelling of her chest. Indeed, distorting her as it did, reining in the flesh of her arms, pinching in her waist to a most painful degree whilst simultaneously hoiking her breasts skyward in a most comical fashion, though her apparel hid the milky fleshiness of her furless skin, her hirsute admirer was left in little doubt that here was, indeed, a woman.
There is no documentary evidence, of course, that Terry was recognised by others, or indeed himself, as being the bearer of that name. Grunts, rather than words were the lingua franca of the small group of chimpanzees of which he was a member and with whom he tended to hang around, tenderly preening and patting or being preened and patted by his colleagues in apehood, when they weren't squabbling or sleeping or engaging in acts of occasionally successful procreation. Terry was the name assigned to him by whomsoever came across the remains of the small group of hunter-gatherers and thus, sadly, we will never really know the exact nature of whatever whimsicality of mind it was that guided their selection. June, on the other hand, we can safely assume to have been named after the calendar month, such nomenclature being a fairly common occurence in the field of anthropology; though whether the name suggests the month of the initial sighting of that first protrusion of her petrified bones or that of their final exhumation, we cannot be entirely sure. Archaeology is, after all, a painfully slow and inexact science.
What we can infer is that at some point after June first lowered her spectacles an inch to establish unmediated eye contact between them, Terry, following the pre-programmed impulses of his hormones and, no doubt, some deeper, cellular instinct to further his and the species' line, would have sensed the loose genetic compatability that existed between himself and June and acted accordingly. The most historically divergent aspect of this coupling - aside from June being arguably the first person to engage in sexual intercourse whilst wearing glasses - would have been the novelty such an enticingly wrapped sexual partner would have held for a traditionally unfussy procreator as Terry. [A note on June's appearance for the contemporary reader might be judicious at this point. She looked and was dressed, we can say, with the benefit of a hindsight and knowledge of cinematic history not available to our simian forebear, not unlike the film star Jean Harlow.]
Blessed with similarly opposable thumbs and a shared fondness for the tactile as his female accomplice, Terry would have wasted little time rolling the taut material up over her rear, to reveal the watchlike intricacies of her nether corsetry. Releasing her bunned hair, which might have appeared to him like a sun-bleached stone attached to her crown, her partner replaced the grip of the hair pins with that of his own fist, riding the bucking of her hips, perhaps peeling back his lips against the afternoon sun to form an approximation of a smile. We can only guess how long Terry would have held June in this fashion before ambling away with a four limbed bounce, his need to be conjoined with her sated and his function complete.
For June, of course, a new coupling had commenced, a small matter of hours after her final coital shriek. For the first few months, there was no real discernable change in her demeanour; her wrappings warmed her through the days of the dimming sun, and soon she was absorbed into the rhythms of the group, preening and being preened, scavenging with them, sleeping with them. But the changes did come and soon June swelled. No longer acquiescent to their advances, savagery gave way, ultimately, to sulleness as, one by one, her suitors were repelled. Now merely tolerated at best, her presence cast a shadow on the tribe. But then, alone outside the confines of the camp, there was heard another shriek; this time an infant's wail joining hers in a happy, if discordant, harmony. Panting, cooing, moaning, June's teeth hacked at the umbilical chord. She wiped a wrist across her lips, daubing a smear of placental blood along her arm. Panting, smiling, and now, finally, giggling like a much younger girl, she cups them in her palm. "A man!" she whispers, her eyes welling up and wide. "I've given birth to a man."
And so, with time, he proves to be. June's son grows up to be a particularly fine man. She watches as he grows, delighting as the summer sun frosts the hairs on his arms as pale as straw, his body tanning, becoming ever more supple and strong as he grows. Bigger, taller as each winter fades, at last he stands before her. A man, her son. Her son, a man. At last she thinks, my son becomes a man. A man to make a mother proud. A man without fur.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
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Thursday 20 September 2007
You Give Me Hope and Consolation…
Wednesday 19th September, 2007: Arsenal 3 (Fabregas, van Persie, Eduardo), Sevilla 0.
I meet Dermot and his eldest boy at half-time in the concourse. We’re one-nil up after a tight and technical 45. It’s the first time I’ve felt really at home at the Emirates. I barely register the shiny spaceship tonight as I head towards the turnstiles and soak up the familiar Arsenal feel of the walk from pub to ground. It helps too when you can pick out a familiar face or two among the 59,000 plus who’ve turned out for tonight’s game; Dermot and son are visible down and to my left, chins resting on wrists as they slouch over the edge of the Upper Tier. 59,000. That’s well over half as many again as turned out for Chelsea’s game at Stamford Bridge last night. They’ll say “well, it was only Rosenborg”, and they’d be right. Only Rosenborg, ranked 80th in UEFA’s meticulously compiled (and meaningless, as it turns out) league table of “co-efficients” – whatever they may be. But perhaps the blues might have managed better than a one-all draw in front of a full house. Or maybe they just need a bit of the King down the King’s Road?
Dermot’s a huge Elvis fan, so the first thing he asks is “do they play ‘The Wonder of You’ before every game?” They have done this season. Elvis’s glitzy seventies classic is the club’s choice to perform the same function as Liverpool’s anthem, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and it seems a pretty canny choice.
When no-one else can understand me
When everything I do is wrong
You give me hope and consolation
You give me strength to carry on...
Fairly standard stuff until you listen to it, as I can’t help but do, as an apology not from a husband to a taken for granted spouse but from the club to us, the supporters. It’s quite a nice, tongue-in-cheek confession to all they put us through, knowing we’ll come back in our droves, week after week, season after season. It couldn’t really be more apt:
...And you’re always there to lend a hand
In everything I do
That’s the wonder
The wonder of you...
It’s nice to have our efforts acknowledged. Although we don’t so much lend a hand as bail them out with a small fortune. Well, at least it’s a better tune than Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry’s ‘I don’t Know Why I love You, But I Do’. And, like the game itself, it has just enough grandeur and pomp to outweigh its own cheesiness.
...And when you smile the world is brighter
You touch my hand and I’m a king
Your kiss to me is worth a fortune
Your love for me is everything...
You can’t beat a good a good sing song before the game, the crowd turned choir, welcoming their team, putting the fear up their adversaries; supporters joined as one in the communion of song:
I guess I’ll never know the reason why
You love me like you do
That’s the wonder
The wonder of you.
All in all, it’s the perfect anthem for the club; an inspired and inspiring choice. So it’s a bit of a shame that no one can be bothered to sing along.
I take my seat for the second half. Arsenal maintain their first half edge, but it’s still a tight and tense game. Fabregas – the boy who can’t stop scoring – gave us the lead half an hour in, his potent but misplaced shot finding the net with the aid of a heavy deflection. Four curvaceously nosed Persian youngsters file past on the way to their seats at the very back of the Upper Tier. They look like young Arab princes. Who knows, their mustard laced, drooping inner tube hotdogs notwithstanding, perhaps that’s what they are. This is the Emirates, after all. But the young princes scampering about on the park below are its real Emirs. They withstand late pressure from a tidy, skillful Sevilla side and, although two further goals slightly exaggerate the true extent of their dominion, this is still a very big win and pretty much the perfect start to the group stage of the Champions League; a confident stride down the road to Moscow.
You look for moments of clarity in games like this, incidents that stand out from the whirling frenzy of passing and movement. One such comes two minutes into stoppage time, with the game already won. The ball breaks loose in midfield and no less than three Arsenal players make for it as if their lives depend upon it. Possession secured, the move begins that ends with Eduardo scoring the third goal of the game, one that has all the hallmarks of the classic Arsenal we thought we’d lost; one touch - Hleb, Fabregas, Eduardo – goal. The post-match huddle bubbles ever more exuberantly; players running at the heaving thicket of red and white and leaping through the air to cling on to the top of the group hug. They look as if they are and as if they feel as light as air, bundling on top of one another like that; kids in the playground. And so they should. Who would want to keep the feet of these young princes on the ground?
Dermot drops me off in Chiswick. I’m waiting for the bus on the High Road when a beautifully spoken Indian accent says quietly, “good result tonight.” “Did you go?” I ask, before I notice the redcurrant Gunners scarf that’s protecting this elegant young Brahmin’s neck from the elements. “Fabregas makes it look so effortless, doesn’t he?” he purrs. I get the 391 to Richmond. The driver looks as if he’s driven here directly from the Mosque at Finsbury Park. He has a long, straggly ash white beard with no moustache. “Good result”, he says, “who scored?” I tell him who scored and precis the game for him as he pulls out behind the bus in front, enjoying, what appears to me, his disproportionate pleasure at being told the bald facts of the match.
So, the night brings a King, four Arab Princes, and a Brahmin. And 59,000 delirious Emirs, all filled with wonder tonight. Now, this morning, comes the news of an event, the shockwaves of which will rumble on along the King’s Road for a while yet. Chelsea have lost their Caesar. He came, he saw, he conquered, but even a Caesar is no match for an Oligarch. There is only room for one special one, it seems. And money doesn’t talk…
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
I meet Dermot and his eldest boy at half-time in the concourse. We’re one-nil up after a tight and technical 45. It’s the first time I’ve felt really at home at the Emirates. I barely register the shiny spaceship tonight as I head towards the turnstiles and soak up the familiar Arsenal feel of the walk from pub to ground. It helps too when you can pick out a familiar face or two among the 59,000 plus who’ve turned out for tonight’s game; Dermot and son are visible down and to my left, chins resting on wrists as they slouch over the edge of the Upper Tier. 59,000. That’s well over half as many again as turned out for Chelsea’s game at Stamford Bridge last night. They’ll say “well, it was only Rosenborg”, and they’d be right. Only Rosenborg, ranked 80th in UEFA’s meticulously compiled (and meaningless, as it turns out) league table of “co-efficients” – whatever they may be. But perhaps the blues might have managed better than a one-all draw in front of a full house. Or maybe they just need a bit of the King down the King’s Road?
Dermot’s a huge Elvis fan, so the first thing he asks is “do they play ‘The Wonder of You’ before every game?” They have done this season. Elvis’s glitzy seventies classic is the club’s choice to perform the same function as Liverpool’s anthem, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and it seems a pretty canny choice.
When no-one else can understand me
When everything I do is wrong
You give me hope and consolation
You give me strength to carry on...
Fairly standard stuff until you listen to it, as I can’t help but do, as an apology not from a husband to a taken for granted spouse but from the club to us, the supporters. It’s quite a nice, tongue-in-cheek confession to all they put us through, knowing we’ll come back in our droves, week after week, season after season. It couldn’t really be more apt:
...And you’re always there to lend a hand
In everything I do
That’s the wonder
The wonder of you...
It’s nice to have our efforts acknowledged. Although we don’t so much lend a hand as bail them out with a small fortune. Well, at least it’s a better tune than Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry’s ‘I don’t Know Why I love You, But I Do’. And, like the game itself, it has just enough grandeur and pomp to outweigh its own cheesiness.
...And when you smile the world is brighter
You touch my hand and I’m a king
Your kiss to me is worth a fortune
Your love for me is everything...
You can’t beat a good a good sing song before the game, the crowd turned choir, welcoming their team, putting the fear up their adversaries; supporters joined as one in the communion of song:
I guess I’ll never know the reason why
You love me like you do
That’s the wonder
The wonder of you.
All in all, it’s the perfect anthem for the club; an inspired and inspiring choice. So it’s a bit of a shame that no one can be bothered to sing along.
I take my seat for the second half. Arsenal maintain their first half edge, but it’s still a tight and tense game. Fabregas – the boy who can’t stop scoring – gave us the lead half an hour in, his potent but misplaced shot finding the net with the aid of a heavy deflection. Four curvaceously nosed Persian youngsters file past on the way to their seats at the very back of the Upper Tier. They look like young Arab princes. Who knows, their mustard laced, drooping inner tube hotdogs notwithstanding, perhaps that’s what they are. This is the Emirates, after all. But the young princes scampering about on the park below are its real Emirs. They withstand late pressure from a tidy, skillful Sevilla side and, although two further goals slightly exaggerate the true extent of their dominion, this is still a very big win and pretty much the perfect start to the group stage of the Champions League; a confident stride down the road to Moscow.
You look for moments of clarity in games like this, incidents that stand out from the whirling frenzy of passing and movement. One such comes two minutes into stoppage time, with the game already won. The ball breaks loose in midfield and no less than three Arsenal players make for it as if their lives depend upon it. Possession secured, the move begins that ends with Eduardo scoring the third goal of the game, one that has all the hallmarks of the classic Arsenal we thought we’d lost; one touch - Hleb, Fabregas, Eduardo – goal. The post-match huddle bubbles ever more exuberantly; players running at the heaving thicket of red and white and leaping through the air to cling on to the top of the group hug. They look as if they are and as if they feel as light as air, bundling on top of one another like that; kids in the playground. And so they should. Who would want to keep the feet of these young princes on the ground?
Dermot drops me off in Chiswick. I’m waiting for the bus on the High Road when a beautifully spoken Indian accent says quietly, “good result tonight.” “Did you go?” I ask, before I notice the redcurrant Gunners scarf that’s protecting this elegant young Brahmin’s neck from the elements. “Fabregas makes it look so effortless, doesn’t he?” he purrs. I get the 391 to Richmond. The driver looks as if he’s driven here directly from the Mosque at Finsbury Park. He has a long, straggly ash white beard with no moustache. “Good result”, he says, “who scored?” I tell him who scored and precis the game for him as he pulls out behind the bus in front, enjoying, what appears to me, his disproportionate pleasure at being told the bald facts of the match.
So, the night brings a King, four Arab Princes, and a Brahmin. And 59,000 delirious Emirs, all filled with wonder tonight. Now, this morning, comes the news of an event, the shockwaves of which will rumble on along the King’s Road for a while yet. Chelsea have lost their Caesar. He came, he saw, he conquered, but even a Caesar is no match for an Oligarch. There is only room for one special one, it seems. And money doesn’t talk…
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Wednesday 19 September 2007
Rosebud...
Citizen Kane is a masterpiece of enigma. It’s only with the film’s fleeting last frames, as Charles Foster Kane’s childhood sleigh is about to be tossed into a furnace, that the first-time viewer finally learns the identity of ‘Rosebud’ – his famously muttered last word. But if the film’s ending is an enigma, the opening sequence could hardly be more explicit. ‘No trespassing’, ‘Keep out!’ warn the signs on Kane’s Xanadu retreat. For the viewer, the message is unequivocal, if a little bizarre considering that they have, presumably, just forked out x amout to watch the story of Kane’s life; there are some things you cannot know, have no right to. Don’t even go there; steer clear.
But there’s something about the camera, isn’t there? It doesn’t know when to give it a rest. In the hands of masters like Welles and his cinematographer on Kane, Gregg Toland, even the barbed wire that wards off intruders from Xanadu is no guard against the steady inquisition of the lens. By and large, the world’s news media is less subtle and possesses little of the artfulness of a Welles or a Toland, but they too are able to vault the mansion wall. Scampering and clambering where Toland’s camera floats and glides, they land with a bump and begin their familiar scrummaging on the same privately owned land. Thus their cameras continue to probe the lives of Gerry and Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine went missing from their Portuguese holiday home in May.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so harsh on the cameras in this instance. They were, after all, invited, not warned away by signs and spikes of wire. Welles assertion still holds true though; there is nothing for you here, don’t even go there. Steer well clear. After all, what can they possibly tell us that we don't not already know? Even as someone without kids, it’s reasonably easy to do the empathetic math. A child goes missing, stays that way for an arduously long time. She is, when you callously reduce the options down to a stark, essential binary, either dead at the hands or alive and in the keep of her abductor(s). For her parents, the latter is the only tenable reality.
And so the cameras were called in, to show and to reveal, to bear witness to the theft, the loss. And so they roll and so we watch and still the child is lost and still we learn nothing that we did not already know. All we can see on the faces of the McCann’s is what you’d expect to be there; the ashen skin, the hollowed out eyes of those who have been cast into their own private versions of hell. Whether it is of their own or another’s making, who can say?
But the camera’s don’t just point and tell, reveal and show – those signs and all that twisted, piercing wire see to that. We must frame a story around what they show us, just as Welles and Mankiewicz’s screenplay orders Toland’s immaculate monochrome into the shape of Charles Kane’s life. And the McCann’s story now appears to be unfolding in a most horrendous fashion. The story, as it was set up in the opening frames of this ghastly realist horror film, has run out of legs. No child, no body, no killer; no story. Just those two faces – ashen, sunken, waiting, hoping, praying. The cameras need a story. So do the police. And so, if we are honest, do we.
We cannot clamber up the signs and vault into their minds; cannot cut through the wire, to see behind those newly media-savvy masks. But perhaps, we think, the cameras can. The media, with its zooms and dollies and grips and slo-mo will take us where we cannot – should not – go ourselves.
And then there is poor Madeleine, the off screen presence at the heart of this drama, its Rosebud. Barely seen aside the face that gazes from a million not wanted but needed posters, eyes with one crying pupil caught in a distant, happy childhood, she is an echoing, muttered ‘Rosebud’ on all our lips. We can only hope that this enigma resolves happily and let the cameras turn elsewhere.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
But there’s something about the camera, isn’t there? It doesn’t know when to give it a rest. In the hands of masters like Welles and his cinematographer on Kane, Gregg Toland, even the barbed wire that wards off intruders from Xanadu is no guard against the steady inquisition of the lens. By and large, the world’s news media is less subtle and possesses little of the artfulness of a Welles or a Toland, but they too are able to vault the mansion wall. Scampering and clambering where Toland’s camera floats and glides, they land with a bump and begin their familiar scrummaging on the same privately owned land. Thus their cameras continue to probe the lives of Gerry and Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine went missing from their Portuguese holiday home in May.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so harsh on the cameras in this instance. They were, after all, invited, not warned away by signs and spikes of wire. Welles assertion still holds true though; there is nothing for you here, don’t even go there. Steer well clear. After all, what can they possibly tell us that we don't not already know? Even as someone without kids, it’s reasonably easy to do the empathetic math. A child goes missing, stays that way for an arduously long time. She is, when you callously reduce the options down to a stark, essential binary, either dead at the hands or alive and in the keep of her abductor(s). For her parents, the latter is the only tenable reality.
And so the cameras were called in, to show and to reveal, to bear witness to the theft, the loss. And so they roll and so we watch and still the child is lost and still we learn nothing that we did not already know. All we can see on the faces of the McCann’s is what you’d expect to be there; the ashen skin, the hollowed out eyes of those who have been cast into their own private versions of hell. Whether it is of their own or another’s making, who can say?
But the camera’s don’t just point and tell, reveal and show – those signs and all that twisted, piercing wire see to that. We must frame a story around what they show us, just as Welles and Mankiewicz’s screenplay orders Toland’s immaculate monochrome into the shape of Charles Kane’s life. And the McCann’s story now appears to be unfolding in a most horrendous fashion. The story, as it was set up in the opening frames of this ghastly realist horror film, has run out of legs. No child, no body, no killer; no story. Just those two faces – ashen, sunken, waiting, hoping, praying. The cameras need a story. So do the police. And so, if we are honest, do we.
We cannot clamber up the signs and vault into their minds; cannot cut through the wire, to see behind those newly media-savvy masks. But perhaps, we think, the cameras can. The media, with its zooms and dollies and grips and slo-mo will take us where we cannot – should not – go ourselves.
And then there is poor Madeleine, the off screen presence at the heart of this drama, its Rosebud. Barely seen aside the face that gazes from a million not wanted but needed posters, eyes with one crying pupil caught in a distant, happy childhood, she is an echoing, muttered ‘Rosebud’ on all our lips. We can only hope that this enigma resolves happily and let the cameras turn elsewhere.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Tuesday 18 September 2007
A Very Short Story...
They've just got into bed. He's just woken from a snooze having fallen asleep halfway through Hell's Kitchen, she's just lying there thinking. Still grumpy from having had his sleep interupted, he hears that quiet breathing punctuated by deep snorting sniffs that he's learned to associate with tears.
'What's up?'
There's a long pause, and then she says;
'Just...
Nothing'.
But something is.
'Come on, love...'
'It's just...'
He already knows what it's just, knows what this is all about but it's always best to make sure, what with her condition.
'It's all this family history business, isn't it?'
She's already traced hers back to the Crimean war before coming up against a bit of a brick wall beyond that. She's just started on his. Well, it's an interest, isn't it? Supposed to be therapeutic.
'Don't you ever stop to think about of all those lives that led to yours?' she asks, turning to face him as he lies staring up at the ceiling through the gloom.
'It's not just two or four or or six or eight or ten people but hundreds - thousands, even, of descendants. Don't you think it's the height of arrogance to see yourself as the pinnacle of all those descendants? As if somehow you have some right to just stop a sequence that spans tens of thousands of years? To just, I don't know - end it all with you and me?'
He's tired after work; heavied and dulled by beer, he doesn't need this.
'Look', he says, 'it's not as if I didn't warn you. I said right from the off that I wasn't interested in having kids'.
There's silence.
'You're bad enough as it is now, if I interupt you at that blessed computer when you're doing your genealogy bit. Imagine what you'd be like if you had some screaming brat constantly demanding attention and food and its arse wiping. And love. Are you telling me you could cope with all the whining and wailing and feeding and changing? You'd have eighteen bloody years of it, not just six months you know.'
He's just about to get on to the ethical stuff - too many people in the world as it is, without another hungry mouth to feed. And then there's her condition. But he realises almost as soon as these further arguments have formed in his mind that they have now gone beyond such reasoning.
'We could always get a cat', he ventures and hears his words thud against the silence of the room.
Because the argument is already over as far as she is concerned. It was over some while ago. It's too late anyway. Time has taken the matter in hand and there are no arguments you can use against time. She feels the same disgust welling up inside her as she did earlier today on the way home from the surgery. There was an overwhelming stench of shit as she walked along the quiet back streets that back onto the railway line. Her chest tightened and her heart felt like an overblown balloon, its membrane pulled too taut, too thin and feeling fit to burst. Up ahead, a ferret-faced boy whacks a football hard across the street. He gives a panicky moan as she walks along side him. She notices a squirrel lying dead in the middle of the street. She isn't sure if it was there before he took a shot or whether it has been laid out just now by the speed and the power, the lethal volleying of the ball. She needs to lose this feeling, needs to get it out in every conceivable direction, to shit, vomit or strain herself free of this suffocating nausea. But she can't stop for a shit or to be sick or to rain down on to the concrete slabs. All she can do is cry.
So she just cries.
And she just tries to free her mind of the image at the heart of her despair.
But she just can't free her mind of the wall of blackness waiting somewhere up ahead.
Then, for a long while there is silence until at last she says, as if she's starting up a new discussion instead of closing this one down,
'I just feel so utterly pointless.'
And the words just hang there like daggers of ice glinting in the mouth of a dark cave.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
'What's up?'
There's a long pause, and then she says;
'Just...
Nothing'.
But something is.
'Come on, love...'
'It's just...'
He already knows what it's just, knows what this is all about but it's always best to make sure, what with her condition.
'It's all this family history business, isn't it?'
She's already traced hers back to the Crimean war before coming up against a bit of a brick wall beyond that. She's just started on his. Well, it's an interest, isn't it? Supposed to be therapeutic.
'Don't you ever stop to think about of all those lives that led to yours?' she asks, turning to face him as he lies staring up at the ceiling through the gloom.
'It's not just two or four or or six or eight or ten people but hundreds - thousands, even, of descendants. Don't you think it's the height of arrogance to see yourself as the pinnacle of all those descendants? As if somehow you have some right to just stop a sequence that spans tens of thousands of years? To just, I don't know - end it all with you and me?'
He's tired after work; heavied and dulled by beer, he doesn't need this.
'Look', he says, 'it's not as if I didn't warn you. I said right from the off that I wasn't interested in having kids'.
There's silence.
'You're bad enough as it is now, if I interupt you at that blessed computer when you're doing your genealogy bit. Imagine what you'd be like if you had some screaming brat constantly demanding attention and food and its arse wiping. And love. Are you telling me you could cope with all the whining and wailing and feeding and changing? You'd have eighteen bloody years of it, not just six months you know.'
He's just about to get on to the ethical stuff - too many people in the world as it is, without another hungry mouth to feed. And then there's her condition. But he realises almost as soon as these further arguments have formed in his mind that they have now gone beyond such reasoning.
'We could always get a cat', he ventures and hears his words thud against the silence of the room.
Because the argument is already over as far as she is concerned. It was over some while ago. It's too late anyway. Time has taken the matter in hand and there are no arguments you can use against time. She feels the same disgust welling up inside her as she did earlier today on the way home from the surgery. There was an overwhelming stench of shit as she walked along the quiet back streets that back onto the railway line. Her chest tightened and her heart felt like an overblown balloon, its membrane pulled too taut, too thin and feeling fit to burst. Up ahead, a ferret-faced boy whacks a football hard across the street. He gives a panicky moan as she walks along side him. She notices a squirrel lying dead in the middle of the street. She isn't sure if it was there before he took a shot or whether it has been laid out just now by the speed and the power, the lethal volleying of the ball. She needs to lose this feeling, needs to get it out in every conceivable direction, to shit, vomit or strain herself free of this suffocating nausea. But she can't stop for a shit or to be sick or to rain down on to the concrete slabs. All she can do is cry.
So she just cries.
And she just tries to free her mind of the image at the heart of her despair.
But she just can't free her mind of the wall of blackness waiting somewhere up ahead.
Then, for a long while there is silence until at last she says, as if she's starting up a new discussion instead of closing this one down,
'I just feel so utterly pointless.'
And the words just hang there like daggers of ice glinting in the mouth of a dark cave.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Sunday 16 September 2007
Through Darkness, the Game Was Stopped...
Saturday 15th September, 2007: Tottenham Hotspur 1 (Bale), Arsenal 3 (Adebayor 2, Fabregas)
Tottenham Hotspur v. Royal Arsenal - This match was played on the ground of the former at Park, Nov. 19th [1887] The 'Spurs at once began to attack, but 10 minutes from the start, the Arsenal scored a lucky goal. From this point, the visitors were pressed throughout and, had it not been for the splendid defence of F. Beardsley (Notts Forest), in goal, the score would have been much larger. Through darkness, the game was stopped 15 minutes before time, the 'Spurs winning by 2 goals to 1
The Weekly Herald, Friday November 25th, 1887
"Through darkness, the game was stopped". Arsenal had arrived late for the game, a fairly common occurence back then, it would seem. The previous week, the Herald reports on the same page, Tottenham and Cheshunt had enjoyed "a pleasant game of 60 minutes, result[ing] in a draw, no goals being scored" before, presumably, the darkness fell once more. Nowadays, barring a failure of the artificial light of the floodlights, it would take more than darkness to stop the North London Derby. Wars came and went and, though they may have reduced the relative importance of the fixture and robbed it of some who had graced its stage, they could not stop it; the two teams played several times in the London Football Combination during World War I and even burying their differences for long enough to share White Hart Lane during World War II. It seems there are some rivalries that just won't lie down, even in the midst of greater territorial disputes.
Almost 120 years on from that first curtailed encounter on Tottenham Marshes, in brilliant late summer sunshine, the 'Spurs and the Arsenal once more square up, this time at White Hart Lane. I listen on the radio while I paint the stairs, my brushwork echoing that of my father and great grandfather, both painters and decorators in their day; dad's paint splattered Sony portable radio relaying the events from the Lane. It's a closer game listened to live than the Match of the Day highlights, shown later, suggest. As they have for the last two seasons in this fixture, Tottenham start the better and get an early goal; the promising youngster Bale curling what seems the perfect free kick - low and creeping in just inside the post - around the Arsenal wall.
Then, in the second half, the game turns on two missed chances by the 'Spurs gifted striker Berbatov. The first, which would have killed the game off, sees him round Arsenal 'keeper Almunia, only to dither with his finish and allow Toure to pull off an astonishing last gasp block when the tall Bulgarian seemed to have done the hard part and certain to score. The second comes after Adebayor's firmly headed equaliser, Berbatov seeing his snap volley from a corner kick go straight into the chest of Gael Clichy defending the Arsenal goalpost.
Minutes later, the game has swung in Arsenal's favour. Fabregas is allowed to waltz into space thirty yards from the Tottenham goal. He seems to have as much time as he wants to steady himself, take aim and fire a howitzer of a shot past the despairing dive of Tim Robinson. There's still time for Tottenham's £16 million summer signing Bent to scuff a glorious chance to bag a share of the spoils for the hosts. Denilson spurns a similarly gilt-edged chance before, seconds later, Adebayor seals both the result and an impressive personal display with a stunning volley. Flicking Fabregas; strongly weighted pass up he, swivels and sends the ball high over Robinson's upstretched arm. It's a goal that may just be the making of him as he attempts to emerge from the shadow of his predecessor Thierry Henry.
It's certainly the sort of goal TH14 would have pulled out of nowhere, but today is all about Cesc Fabregas. From the evidence of the highlights, the geometry and precision of his passing seems to become more certain and delightful with each game. Two simple angled balls along the deck bisect the Tottenham defence and should have been rewarded with goals. He's already scored a goal more than he did in the whole of the last campaign, so let's hope those young legs can last and that his agent doesn't get too greedy.
We got the full 90 today, but even another light curtailed seventy-five would have delivered more quality from these two sides, who are closer in their potential than league standings and today's result suggest, than in most Premier League games. The only darkness to be found must be amongst the Tottenham faithful, who saw their team again play so well, only to lose. But both sides have felt the lights go out many a time over the last 119 years and I'm sure both will again.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Tottenham Hotspur v. Royal Arsenal - This match was played on the ground of the former at Park, Nov. 19th [1887] The 'Spurs at once began to attack, but 10 minutes from the start, the Arsenal scored a lucky goal. From this point, the visitors were pressed throughout and, had it not been for the splendid defence of F. Beardsley (Notts Forest), in goal, the score would have been much larger. Through darkness, the game was stopped 15 minutes before time, the 'Spurs winning by 2 goals to 1
The Weekly Herald, Friday November 25th, 1887
"Through darkness, the game was stopped". Arsenal had arrived late for the game, a fairly common occurence back then, it would seem. The previous week, the Herald reports on the same page, Tottenham and Cheshunt had enjoyed "a pleasant game of 60 minutes, result[ing] in a draw, no goals being scored" before, presumably, the darkness fell once more. Nowadays, barring a failure of the artificial light of the floodlights, it would take more than darkness to stop the North London Derby. Wars came and went and, though they may have reduced the relative importance of the fixture and robbed it of some who had graced its stage, they could not stop it; the two teams played several times in the London Football Combination during World War I and even burying their differences for long enough to share White Hart Lane during World War II. It seems there are some rivalries that just won't lie down, even in the midst of greater territorial disputes.
Almost 120 years on from that first curtailed encounter on Tottenham Marshes, in brilliant late summer sunshine, the 'Spurs and the Arsenal once more square up, this time at White Hart Lane. I listen on the radio while I paint the stairs, my brushwork echoing that of my father and great grandfather, both painters and decorators in their day; dad's paint splattered Sony portable radio relaying the events from the Lane. It's a closer game listened to live than the Match of the Day highlights, shown later, suggest. As they have for the last two seasons in this fixture, Tottenham start the better and get an early goal; the promising youngster Bale curling what seems the perfect free kick - low and creeping in just inside the post - around the Arsenal wall.
Then, in the second half, the game turns on two missed chances by the 'Spurs gifted striker Berbatov. The first, which would have killed the game off, sees him round Arsenal 'keeper Almunia, only to dither with his finish and allow Toure to pull off an astonishing last gasp block when the tall Bulgarian seemed to have done the hard part and certain to score. The second comes after Adebayor's firmly headed equaliser, Berbatov seeing his snap volley from a corner kick go straight into the chest of Gael Clichy defending the Arsenal goalpost.
Minutes later, the game has swung in Arsenal's favour. Fabregas is allowed to waltz into space thirty yards from the Tottenham goal. He seems to have as much time as he wants to steady himself, take aim and fire a howitzer of a shot past the despairing dive of Tim Robinson. There's still time for Tottenham's £16 million summer signing Bent to scuff a glorious chance to bag a share of the spoils for the hosts. Denilson spurns a similarly gilt-edged chance before, seconds later, Adebayor seals both the result and an impressive personal display with a stunning volley. Flicking Fabregas; strongly weighted pass up he, swivels and sends the ball high over Robinson's upstretched arm. It's a goal that may just be the making of him as he attempts to emerge from the shadow of his predecessor Thierry Henry.
It's certainly the sort of goal TH14 would have pulled out of nowhere, but today is all about Cesc Fabregas. From the evidence of the highlights, the geometry and precision of his passing seems to become more certain and delightful with each game. Two simple angled balls along the deck bisect the Tottenham defence and should have been rewarded with goals. He's already scored a goal more than he did in the whole of the last campaign, so let's hope those young legs can last and that his agent doesn't get too greedy.
We got the full 90 today, but even another light curtailed seventy-five would have delivered more quality from these two sides, who are closer in their potential than league standings and today's result suggest, than in most Premier League games. The only darkness to be found must be amongst the Tottenham faithful, who saw their team again play so well, only to lose. But both sides have felt the lights go out many a time over the last 119 years and I'm sure both will again.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Saturday 15 September 2007
1894...
Saturday 14th April, 1894: Arsenal 0, Burton Swifts 2 (scorers unknown)
"I've always been a coward": a soldier of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment takes the Hounds of Love for a brisk constitutional...
An interesting year, 1894. W.K. Dickson received a patent for motion picture film on January 7th. In February, French anarchist Martial Bourdin was foiled in his attempt to blow up the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The following month, fires destroyed over a thousand buildings in Shanghai. 71 years years before I'd be born, Nikita Sergeevich Khruschev laid prior claim to my birthday on 17th April. Mayday saw riots in, of all places, Cleveland Ohio. French President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on June 24th. In September 12,000 tailors went on strike over the sweat shop conditions in which they were expected to work. The inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax, died. Bessie Smith was born. And on a spring Saturday, Woolwich Arsenal ended their first season in the Football League (Division 2) with a home defeat to Burton Swifts. They finished 9th, 22 points behind 2nd Division Champions Liverpool, who'd beaten "the Reds", as they were then known, 5-0 at the Manor Ground and 2-0 at Anfield. Quite a year, but the most momentous thing that happened in that year, at least as far as my family history is concerned, isn't to be found in the Football League Handbook or entered on Wikipedia.
My great Grandfather, Charles William Knight, was born in Woolwich. I like to think that at some point he might have joined the steadily growing swell of spectators who would watch the forefathers of the current side then called Royal, later Woolwich, Arsenal play on Plumstead Common or at the Manor Ground, close to the Royal Arsenal itself from which the football club grew. A Scotsman, David Dankin, was the prime force behind the establishment of the first Arsenal side. Little more than a works' team, this group of players had named themselves Dial Square after one of the Royal Arsenal's workshops, situated between Woolwich and Plumstead. Bouyed, no doubt, by a 6-0 demolition of Eastern Wanderers in their first ever game on 11th December 1886, two weeks later, on Christmas Day, they changed the name to the far grander Royal Arsenal. I wonder, did he ever see them play?
"Would you mind, awfully...erm, falling in chaps?": the badge of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment - as seen on a member of Dad's Army near you (source: wikipedia) The motto - "Quo fas et Gloria Ducunt - Invicta" isn't as rude as it sounds...
By my reckoning, there would have been 8 years between the formation of the club and the earliest time my great-Grandfather might have made the move from Woolwich. At some point, Charles joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and that step would lead him to Ulster where the fortunes of his family and that of the Crawfords would meet. At some time in 1894, the 1st Battalion of the Royal West Kents was sent to Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in pre-partition Ireland. I can't say for sure that Charles William Knight was sent on that initial despatch, but even if he wasn't, that's certainly where he ended up. That's where my grandfather Robert George was born, at New Row in Enniskillen on 27th June 1908. Charles had obviously liked Enniskillen enough to stay, or had had no option to leave.
I have a feeling it was the former. Another Charles - his grandson, my uncle - told me recently that Charles William Knight had joined the "Enniskillen Rifles" as my uncle described them, when he retired as a regular with the West Kents. Perhaps he'd found it hard to give up the life of a soldier; I believe he'd made it to (at least) the rank of Captain, sometime around the period of the Great War. I can't be sure it's my Great Grandfather Charles, but a C.W.R. Knight was awarded the Military Cross between 1914-18 and held that rank at the time of the award. It's just that rogue 'R' that makes me doubt it - it doesn't show up anywhere else, but everything else fits. Whether those Enniskillen rifles are the same as the famous Fusiliers, who fought in the Boer and Great Wars, I'm not sure. It looks that the first Battalion spent World War I stationed in Dublin. I'm pretty sure that was the Battalion with which Charles would have gone over to Ireland in or after 1894. It's a gut feeling, but I think the averages also suggest that you had a better chance of living to a pensionable age and seeing your son get married (as he did) serving in Dublin than on the Western Front.
My hunch is that if he carried on soldiering after retirement, it would have been with the emergent Ulster Volunteer Force or one of the quasi-militia that appear to have been quite legal providing you could find a judge sympathetic (or, more honestly, Unionist) enough to enable you and your mates to parade and drill your arms; publicly, provocatively. Or, possibly, he just kept a rifle handy in case of emergencies. Whatever the case and regardless of whether he ever got to see the team that grew up in his home town just as he was leaving it, great grand da Charlie was, I'm sure, a gunner all his life.
But then, maybe it wasn't the guns and the authority and the adventure. Perhaps it was the lure of Enniskillen itself? I've never been there, but I've seen enough of Ulster to know how entrancing that combination of glistening lough and dark, smouldering land can be; the light lasering through the trees and blazing onto those vast steel sheets of water. Enniskillen is Inis Ceithleann in the original Irish. It means Kathleen's Island. And it is an island, of sorts, situated as it is between the two lakes that make up Lough Erne. Enniskillen or Inis Ceithleann? I prefer both of those to the grimly appropriate Inniskilling. I imagine that if Charles Knight had indeed set off there in 1894, it would have been a tense garrison town he'd have been confronted with. The previous year had seen the collapse of the Second Home Rule Bill, Horace Curzon Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society had been formed the same year that the West Kents arrived, the non-violent pressure for some redress for the historical debt accruing to the inequities begun with Cromwell's plantations appearing increasingly unanswerable...
And yet, remaining unanswered. It would have been a strange time, a sort of cold war-style prelude to the Easter Rising and the Civil War. And all the time, the country's natural beauty standing there before the participants as a rebuke to the divisions and suspicions and mistrust that carried on patiently brewing; mounting daily, biding their time, waiting to explode.
So maybe that's why this London boy stayed; the country - Kathleen's Island - had its talons in him. Or perhaps it's even simpler than that. Not a Kathleen, but a Catherine. I can't be certain of the particulars beyond the facts in my hand; Charles and Catherine Knight had a son, Robert George, my grandfather, on 27th June, 1908. Word would have been sent back to the Knights in England, no doubt. Perhaps a few pints were downed in celebration at the Royal Oak, the pub where on that Christmas Day in 1886, Royal Arsenal was toasted by the players from Dial Square? A toast or two, perhaps, raised to their own, the Queen's Own West Kent, the loyal gunner all those miles away over the water. They'd say God Bless the protector, keep the faith as they clinked their glasses. Keep the faith, defender of the faith.
But then, maybe they'd all have met up already? For the wedding. I think I have a year. Sometime in 1904, did they ever make the trip to Enniskillen, those crusading Knights? It's hard to pin it down, because several Catherine Rooneys who show up on the 1901 census as residing in Fermanagh could have been his Catherine, my great-grandmother. But I think I've narrowed it done to one who was 25 in 1901, of perfect marrying age in 1904 (28) and ripe to bear a son in another four. She lived and was married in Lisnaskea, in the parish of Aghalurcher, and that's also a place with our family's ties. So I'm pretty sure that I've seen my great-grandmother on that list and that she was a lass from Lisnaskea and I feel I know her a bit better despite knowing nothing, really, about her at all.
But even if I'm wrong, and she came from somewhere else - Ardmoney, Crummer, Derrygannon, Derryneese - she shares one thing with all those other Catherine Rooneys. Something else that doesn't quite fit. Because whatever else she may have been, the woman that this defender-of-the-faith ancestor of mine married and settled down with was not a protestant. Scrolling down the third column in the list of results, two letters bind all these disparate Catherine Rooneys - whether from Greaghnafine, Drumcully or Ederdacurragh - into a sororial regiment of their own; RC...RC...RC...RC...RC. If Charles Knight stayed in Ulster for the love of a woman, it must have been of the powerful and overwhelming kind. Because unless she evaded the census or came out of the sky like a bolt from the blue, one thing is for sure; my great-grandmother was almost certainly a Catholic.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
"I've always been a coward": a soldier of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment takes the Hounds of Love for a brisk constitutional...
An interesting year, 1894. W.K. Dickson received a patent for motion picture film on January 7th. In February, French anarchist Martial Bourdin was foiled in his attempt to blow up the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The following month, fires destroyed over a thousand buildings in Shanghai. 71 years years before I'd be born, Nikita Sergeevich Khruschev laid prior claim to my birthday on 17th April. Mayday saw riots in, of all places, Cleveland Ohio. French President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on June 24th. In September 12,000 tailors went on strike over the sweat shop conditions in which they were expected to work. The inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax, died. Bessie Smith was born. And on a spring Saturday, Woolwich Arsenal ended their first season in the Football League (Division 2) with a home defeat to Burton Swifts. They finished 9th, 22 points behind 2nd Division Champions Liverpool, who'd beaten "the Reds", as they were then known, 5-0 at the Manor Ground and 2-0 at Anfield. Quite a year, but the most momentous thing that happened in that year, at least as far as my family history is concerned, isn't to be found in the Football League Handbook or entered on Wikipedia.
My great Grandfather, Charles William Knight, was born in Woolwich. I like to think that at some point he might have joined the steadily growing swell of spectators who would watch the forefathers of the current side then called Royal, later Woolwich, Arsenal play on Plumstead Common or at the Manor Ground, close to the Royal Arsenal itself from which the football club grew. A Scotsman, David Dankin, was the prime force behind the establishment of the first Arsenal side. Little more than a works' team, this group of players had named themselves Dial Square after one of the Royal Arsenal's workshops, situated between Woolwich and Plumstead. Bouyed, no doubt, by a 6-0 demolition of Eastern Wanderers in their first ever game on 11th December 1886, two weeks later, on Christmas Day, they changed the name to the far grander Royal Arsenal. I wonder, did he ever see them play?
"Would you mind, awfully...erm, falling in chaps?": the badge of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment - as seen on a member of Dad's Army near you (source: wikipedia) The motto - "Quo fas et Gloria Ducunt - Invicta" isn't as rude as it sounds...
By my reckoning, there would have been 8 years between the formation of the club and the earliest time my great-Grandfather might have made the move from Woolwich. At some point, Charles joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and that step would lead him to Ulster where the fortunes of his family and that of the Crawfords would meet. At some time in 1894, the 1st Battalion of the Royal West Kents was sent to Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in pre-partition Ireland. I can't say for sure that Charles William Knight was sent on that initial despatch, but even if he wasn't, that's certainly where he ended up. That's where my grandfather Robert George was born, at New Row in Enniskillen on 27th June 1908. Charles had obviously liked Enniskillen enough to stay, or had had no option to leave.
I have a feeling it was the former. Another Charles - his grandson, my uncle - told me recently that Charles William Knight had joined the "Enniskillen Rifles" as my uncle described them, when he retired as a regular with the West Kents. Perhaps he'd found it hard to give up the life of a soldier; I believe he'd made it to (at least) the rank of Captain, sometime around the period of the Great War. I can't be sure it's my Great Grandfather Charles, but a C.W.R. Knight was awarded the Military Cross between 1914-18 and held that rank at the time of the award. It's just that rogue 'R' that makes me doubt it - it doesn't show up anywhere else, but everything else fits. Whether those Enniskillen rifles are the same as the famous Fusiliers, who fought in the Boer and Great Wars, I'm not sure. It looks that the first Battalion spent World War I stationed in Dublin. I'm pretty sure that was the Battalion with which Charles would have gone over to Ireland in or after 1894. It's a gut feeling, but I think the averages also suggest that you had a better chance of living to a pensionable age and seeing your son get married (as he did) serving in Dublin than on the Western Front.
My hunch is that if he carried on soldiering after retirement, it would have been with the emergent Ulster Volunteer Force or one of the quasi-militia that appear to have been quite legal providing you could find a judge sympathetic (or, more honestly, Unionist) enough to enable you and your mates to parade and drill your arms; publicly, provocatively. Or, possibly, he just kept a rifle handy in case of emergencies. Whatever the case and regardless of whether he ever got to see the team that grew up in his home town just as he was leaving it, great grand da Charlie was, I'm sure, a gunner all his life.
But then, maybe it wasn't the guns and the authority and the adventure. Perhaps it was the lure of Enniskillen itself? I've never been there, but I've seen enough of Ulster to know how entrancing that combination of glistening lough and dark, smouldering land can be; the light lasering through the trees and blazing onto those vast steel sheets of water. Enniskillen is Inis Ceithleann in the original Irish. It means Kathleen's Island. And it is an island, of sorts, situated as it is between the two lakes that make up Lough Erne. Enniskillen or Inis Ceithleann? I prefer both of those to the grimly appropriate Inniskilling. I imagine that if Charles Knight had indeed set off there in 1894, it would have been a tense garrison town he'd have been confronted with. The previous year had seen the collapse of the Second Home Rule Bill, Horace Curzon Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society had been formed the same year that the West Kents arrived, the non-violent pressure for some redress for the historical debt accruing to the inequities begun with Cromwell's plantations appearing increasingly unanswerable...
And yet, remaining unanswered. It would have been a strange time, a sort of cold war-style prelude to the Easter Rising and the Civil War. And all the time, the country's natural beauty standing there before the participants as a rebuke to the divisions and suspicions and mistrust that carried on patiently brewing; mounting daily, biding their time, waiting to explode.
So maybe that's why this London boy stayed; the country - Kathleen's Island - had its talons in him. Or perhaps it's even simpler than that. Not a Kathleen, but a Catherine. I can't be certain of the particulars beyond the facts in my hand; Charles and Catherine Knight had a son, Robert George, my grandfather, on 27th June, 1908. Word would have been sent back to the Knights in England, no doubt. Perhaps a few pints were downed in celebration at the Royal Oak, the pub where on that Christmas Day in 1886, Royal Arsenal was toasted by the players from Dial Square? A toast or two, perhaps, raised to their own, the Queen's Own West Kent, the loyal gunner all those miles away over the water. They'd say God Bless the protector, keep the faith as they clinked their glasses. Keep the faith, defender of the faith.
But then, maybe they'd all have met up already? For the wedding. I think I have a year. Sometime in 1904, did they ever make the trip to Enniskillen, those crusading Knights? It's hard to pin it down, because several Catherine Rooneys who show up on the 1901 census as residing in Fermanagh could have been his Catherine, my great-grandmother. But I think I've narrowed it done to one who was 25 in 1901, of perfect marrying age in 1904 (28) and ripe to bear a son in another four. She lived and was married in Lisnaskea, in the parish of Aghalurcher, and that's also a place with our family's ties. So I'm pretty sure that I've seen my great-grandmother on that list and that she was a lass from Lisnaskea and I feel I know her a bit better despite knowing nothing, really, about her at all.
But even if I'm wrong, and she came from somewhere else - Ardmoney, Crummer, Derrygannon, Derryneese - she shares one thing with all those other Catherine Rooneys. Something else that doesn't quite fit. Because whatever else she may have been, the woman that this defender-of-the-faith ancestor of mine married and settled down with was not a protestant. Scrolling down the third column in the list of results, two letters bind all these disparate Catherine Rooneys - whether from Greaghnafine, Drumcully or Ederdacurragh - into a sororial regiment of their own; RC...RC...RC...RC...RC. If Charles Knight stayed in Ulster for the love of a woman, it must have been of the powerful and overwhelming kind. Because unless she evaded the census or came out of the sky like a bolt from the blue, one thing is for sure; my great-grandmother was almost certainly a Catholic.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Friday 14 September 2007
497 Archway Road...
497 Archway Road: no, there was no piano and it wasn't playing hot behind the green door.
This is the old family home as it is today. My grandparents brought the family over from Belfast sometime around 1952/1953. My Aunt, Alison, thinks she was about 6 months old. This is her with her mother, Sarah (Sadie) Knight and an uncle (Alec) outside 497:
....that's Roderick David Stewart in his own words. Born in Highgate, North London, on 10th January 1945. Rod's father Robert Joseph Stewart came from King's Port in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rod's mother, Elsie, came from Upper Holloway, North London. The Cockney girl fell for the Scot and the couple married in 1928. The Stewart clan began to appear afterwards. Rod's brothers Don and Bob and his sisters Mary and Peggy were all born in Scotland. However the family moved to London to 507 Archway Road, Highgate where after a gap of eight years, young Roddy was born. This means that Rod is the only member of the family to have been born in England, a misfortune which Rod has tended to overlook....
Rod Stewart's childhood was conventional. He lived above the newsagent's shop in Archway Road in North London. The newsagent's shop was owned by the Stewarts themselves. As already mentionned, Roderick was the youngest of five so he was spoilt by his family but of course he was taught to respect his elders, especially his parents. He was mainly interested in football and model railways. He's never lost that passion over the years. He still enjoys to play with the model railway and football is still as important (or even more) to him than it was way back in the fifties. He was very much interested in the singer Al Jolson, an American Jewish baritone, who was very popular in the thirties. Rod's father and the two brothers were football fans. They even started a local team called the 'Highgate Redwings'.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article713738.ece
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~donegalstrongs/estates.htm#Colebrook
Agalun Corralough/Corlongford Killartry Aghacramphill Cornakessagh Kilcarry Aghavea Cornamucklagh Killybarne Aghavoory Cornarooslan Killycloghy Agheeghter Cran Killykeeran Aghnacloy Cranbrooke Knockmacmanus Aghnagrane Creagh Largy Altagoaghan Crocknagowan Lisboy Altawark Crocknagrally Lismalore Altnaponer Curraghanall Lisnabane Ardmoney Deerpark Lisolvan Ardmore Derrinton Longfield Arduncheon Derrycrum Lurganbane Arlish Derrychree Magonragh Ashbrooke Derrychulla Mullaghafad Aughnagrawne Derrycullion Mongibbaghan Ballymacaffry Derryheely Monmurry [?Bannafily] Derryloman Nutfield Bohattan Derrynalester Owenskerry Bonnerloghy [Bunlougher] Derrynavogy Rafintan Boyhill Dooederny Ramult Breandrum Doogary Ranafely Brobrohan Dressoge Raw Brookeborough Drombrughas Sheebeg Broughderg Drumgorran Skeoge Bunlougher Drummorris Stripe Cappanagh Edengilhorn Tattenaheglish Carrickapolin Erdinagh Tattenalee Cavanagarvan Ervey Tattenbuddagh Cavanaleck Eshacorran Tattendillur Cavans Eshnasillog Tattinfree Claraghy Eskeragh Tattykeeran Cleen Foglish Tattynuckle Cleffany Foydragh Tattyreagh Cloghtogle Gorteen Tireeghan Coolcoghill Greagh Tirkenny Coolrakelly Grogey Todragh Cooltrane Guderagh Trasna Cooneen Grogey Tullreagh Corcreeny Killabran Tullykenneye Corlacky Killabreagy Tullynagowan Corlough White Hill
http://www.ulsterancestry.com/ua-BrookeDeeds.html
http://www.regiments.org/regiments/uk/depot/1873.htm
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Wednesday 12 September 2007
September 11th ...
Tuesday 11th September, 2007: Japan 2 (Miyama 2), England 2 (Smith 2)
A young kid, blond - 7? 8? 9? 10? - shapes to take a corner. He's wearing this season's home kit, redcurrant and white hooped socks, redcurrant shorts and the sleeves of his spanking new white shirt combine with the plain red bib he has been given to form a makeshift, old-style Arsenal home shirt. The crowded box awaits his delivery, but instead of hoofing it in he plays it short and square to his team mate, gratefully receives the return pass and jinks past one, two defenders before one of the dads nicks the ball off his foot for another corner just as he'd been about to shoot. This time he puts the ball straight into the mixer, a perfect cross that's dying out to be volleyed into the corner of the miniature goals they've set up. But the young recipient of this golden opportunity realises too late the chance of glory he has been presented on a plate. Before he can react, the moment has gone. The ball connects dully with his instep, gets stuck under his stationary, clodhopping foot, time is slow no longer and the play descends once more into a frantic, meaningless scrum.
There's always a game going on somewhere, always someone between the sticks. There's always someone watching. Someone recording the particulars.
Smith's reference: "... how dearly I would love to kick with the fray"...
There's a game in Shanghai too; Japan versus England in the FIFA Women's World Cup. Watching the match, you could be forgiven for wondering if British scientists have somehow succeeded in keeping quiet about the most astonishing discovery of the newborn century. Without any hue whatsoever and with a similar absence of cry, the FA boffins have managed to jigger about with all those X/Y chromosomes in such a way as to eradicate all of those traditionally recognised differences of gender and sex. Bar a few more pony tails than you'd normally expect to see post-David Seaman, and a greater ability to find similarly shirted colleagues with their passes, the pride of English lionesses so resembles their male three lion shirted counterparts that you wonder how the FA have managed to pull it off without setting off all manner of drug scandals, not to mention getting Trinny and Susannah involved.
Obviously, this similarity has its cons as well as its pros. The England ladies play with admirable verve and vigour, passing firmly and crisply among themselves creating the more promising openings as well as giving it plenty of stick and putting it about a bit whenever necessary, and to generally good effect. Easily the classier of the two sides, it's just a matter of time, you think to yourself, before all the patient passing and steady pressure leads to a goal. And sure enough, eventually it does. Japan's handful of a number 9, Arakawa (Moira Stewart on a *very*, *very* bad hair day) is on the receiving end of a bit of stick, the result of a degree of putting it about a bit too much by the England defence. The American Referee, Kari Seitz (Sigourney Weaver playing a lesbian refereee) blows for a foul. Up steps Miyama to blast the ball through the wall and score. One-nil to Japan. England coach Hope Powell (Don Letts) looks on aghast, presumably reminded by England's dismal wall of all that rapping she used to do with Big Audio Dynamite, wondering like the rest of us why she didn't just stick to making documentaries about the early days of the Clash.
Stewart: "...sport, and in football, England's Women were cruelly denied a deserved victory in their first match of the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup when I was pulled down on the edge of the penalty area for a last minute free kick from which Japan scored a last gasp equaliser..."
But this is no ordinary England ladies side. They are, to all intents and purposes, the Arsenal ladies side who went undefeated in four competitions last season - at least seven of their number are. With that Magnificent Seven in their midst, these ladies don't know how to lose. And so with patience and increasing power and pace, they somehow turn the game around. Or rather, girl gooner Kelly Smith does. The player the BBC have been describing as the best player in the Women's game looks to have fallen understandably short of such portentous billing until, within the space of two minutes as the game looks just to have slipped beyond England, she produces two moments of individual brilliance that make you think she might just be the best player in the game, period. For the first she shimmers just inside the box, somehow keeping the ball within her body's sphere of influence, remaining calm enough in the gyroscope of disorder she's generated in the Japanese defence to slot the ball home with steely grace. Her scoring boot is off and at her lips in celebration almost before the ball has hit the net.
Then, with the game still reeling from her grabbing of it by the scruff of the neck, she's powering into the box from the left. Closing in on the Japanese goal from a tight angle, time once again stands still for her as, directing her first shot straight at the keeper, she's still composed and alert enough to steer the parried rebound home. Both boots are off this time as the England team surround her in grateful celebration. All that's required to make these Arsenal and England ladies total replicants of their male models is the completely unwarranted equaliser against the run of play. This duly arrives in the fourth minute of stoppage time, Miyama showing us all the full repertoire of her free kick heartbreakers, this time placing the ball over the England wall inside the right hand post of Rachel Brown's goal. It's the last kick of the game and you don't know whether to laugh or cry. You're laughing because you know its a classic game that's not over until the very last second; you want to cry because you hadn't been enjoying watching England play so much for as long as you can remember.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
A young kid, blond - 7? 8? 9? 10? - shapes to take a corner. He's wearing this season's home kit, redcurrant and white hooped socks, redcurrant shorts and the sleeves of his spanking new white shirt combine with the plain red bib he has been given to form a makeshift, old-style Arsenal home shirt. The crowded box awaits his delivery, but instead of hoofing it in he plays it short and square to his team mate, gratefully receives the return pass and jinks past one, two defenders before one of the dads nicks the ball off his foot for another corner just as he'd been about to shoot. This time he puts the ball straight into the mixer, a perfect cross that's dying out to be volleyed into the corner of the miniature goals they've set up. But the young recipient of this golden opportunity realises too late the chance of glory he has been presented on a plate. Before he can react, the moment has gone. The ball connects dully with his instep, gets stuck under his stationary, clodhopping foot, time is slow no longer and the play descends once more into a frantic, meaningless scrum.
There's always a game going on somewhere, always someone between the sticks. There's always someone watching. Someone recording the particulars.
Smith's reference: "... how dearly I would love to kick with the fray"...
There's a game in Shanghai too; Japan versus England in the FIFA Women's World Cup. Watching the match, you could be forgiven for wondering if British scientists have somehow succeeded in keeping quiet about the most astonishing discovery of the newborn century. Without any hue whatsoever and with a similar absence of cry, the FA boffins have managed to jigger about with all those X/Y chromosomes in such a way as to eradicate all of those traditionally recognised differences of gender and sex. Bar a few more pony tails than you'd normally expect to see post-David Seaman, and a greater ability to find similarly shirted colleagues with their passes, the pride of English lionesses so resembles their male three lion shirted counterparts that you wonder how the FA have managed to pull it off without setting off all manner of drug scandals, not to mention getting Trinny and Susannah involved.
Obviously, this similarity has its cons as well as its pros. The England ladies play with admirable verve and vigour, passing firmly and crisply among themselves creating the more promising openings as well as giving it plenty of stick and putting it about a bit whenever necessary, and to generally good effect. Easily the classier of the two sides, it's just a matter of time, you think to yourself, before all the patient passing and steady pressure leads to a goal. And sure enough, eventually it does. Japan's handful of a number 9, Arakawa (Moira Stewart on a *very*, *very* bad hair day) is on the receiving end of a bit of stick, the result of a degree of putting it about a bit too much by the England defence. The American Referee, Kari Seitz (Sigourney Weaver playing a lesbian refereee) blows for a foul. Up steps Miyama to blast the ball through the wall and score. One-nil to Japan. England coach Hope Powell (Don Letts) looks on aghast, presumably reminded by England's dismal wall of all that rapping she used to do with Big Audio Dynamite, wondering like the rest of us why she didn't just stick to making documentaries about the early days of the Clash.
Stewart: "...sport, and in football, England's Women were cruelly denied a deserved victory in their first match of the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup when I was pulled down on the edge of the penalty area for a last minute free kick from which Japan scored a last gasp equaliser..."
But this is no ordinary England ladies side. They are, to all intents and purposes, the Arsenal ladies side who went undefeated in four competitions last season - at least seven of their number are. With that Magnificent Seven in their midst, these ladies don't know how to lose. And so with patience and increasing power and pace, they somehow turn the game around. Or rather, girl gooner Kelly Smith does. The player the BBC have been describing as the best player in the Women's game looks to have fallen understandably short of such portentous billing until, within the space of two minutes as the game looks just to have slipped beyond England, she produces two moments of individual brilliance that make you think she might just be the best player in the game, period. For the first she shimmers just inside the box, somehow keeping the ball within her body's sphere of influence, remaining calm enough in the gyroscope of disorder she's generated in the Japanese defence to slot the ball home with steely grace. Her scoring boot is off and at her lips in celebration almost before the ball has hit the net.
Then, with the game still reeling from her grabbing of it by the scruff of the neck, she's powering into the box from the left. Closing in on the Japanese goal from a tight angle, time once again stands still for her as, directing her first shot straight at the keeper, she's still composed and alert enough to steer the parried rebound home. Both boots are off this time as the England team surround her in grateful celebration. All that's required to make these Arsenal and England ladies total replicants of their male models is the completely unwarranted equaliser against the run of play. This duly arrives in the fourth minute of stoppage time, Miyama showing us all the full repertoire of her free kick heartbreakers, this time placing the ball over the England wall inside the right hand post of Rachel Brown's goal. It's the last kick of the game and you don't know whether to laugh or cry. You're laughing because you know its a classic game that's not over until the very last second; you want to cry because you hadn't been enjoying watching England play so much for as long as you can remember.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Monday 10 September 2007
Laika...
This is Nick.
"We'll keep the blue flag flying here": Comrade Abadzis inspects the newly renovated Stamford Bridge.
We've known each other since about 1979. He delights in reminding me that my first words to him were "I hate you, Nick Abadzis". I'm fairly sure he's making it up, although I always was a contrary thing, even way back then, so maybe a I did say something along those lines. But regardless of that, sometime in 1980 or 1981, I stopped hating him for long enough (if I ever had in the first place) to realise that I actually liked him rather a lot. Sitting in a tree in Richmond Park whilst on a Biology field trip, we became friends and we've pretty much stayed like that for what will soon be thirty years - friends, that is, we're not still sitting up a tree in Richmond Park.
So that, before we go any further, is my declaration of interest. Nick's just had another book published and on Sunday I had the great pleasure of finally getting to read it. Laika is the story of the second Soviet space flight. The brainchild of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Sputnik I had been launched on October 4th, 1957, beep-beeping to the consternation and bemusement of the non-Communist world below its orbit. Sputnik II's preparation was cruelly cut short, scheduled as it was to be launched to coincide with the fortieth anniverary of the October Revolution. This project was to go one step further than Sputnik I. This time Korolev's team would send not just a beep generator but a living creature into orbit. The catch was, they only had a month to build the thing from scratch. Now *that's* a deadline.
Laika was the heroic Husky-Samoyed crossbreed chosen to pioneer the mammalian (and Soviet) conquest of the universe stretched out enticingly beyond the earth's atmosphere. Only her name wasn't really Laika. Everyone called Kudryavka - "Little Curly" - until Korolev changed her name; Laika, 'Barker'. Sergei Pavlovich's life had been saved by a dog as he wandered the streets of Magadan, starving from his ordeal in the gulag, alerted by its barking to a discarded loaf of bread. This meeting with another, curly-tailed dog was, he believed, like his survival a proof of his destiny; at least it was if you believe Nick's story. Oh, I know telling stories is telling lies, but sometimes we need a white lie or two to get behind the even bigger lies. The lies we're told by history.
You've had my declaration of interest, but interest seems barely to do the bias involved here sufficient justice. You see, no matter how much you might not want to, when you hold in your hands a book by one of your friends, you are discreetly cordoned off from the huddled masses of the general readership. "Come this way", say the voices of the genuflecting flunkies as they lead you on your red carpetted way. Far from the harrassed and cramped readers hanging from their handrails in economy they take you; for this one rare journey you will be travelling in first class. You may indeed be holding the same 208 pages as any other reader in your eager, trembling hands, but this is one privilege you are unable to renounce. For you belong to The Party now, you are no longer a mere prole, and with that elevation there comes danger. You are no ordinary reader because you know. You know as they do not that what you are holding in your hands are not mere pages; they are years.
So how can you trust a Party man? I wouldn't trust myself. But you will just have to trust me, as little Kudryavka has no choice but to trust her handler, Yelana Dubrovsky, even though she is ultimately powerless to reward her charge's faith. Trust me, even though this will read, I know, like propaganda - how can it not? But try to see it from the propagandist's p.o.v. Imagine that you too have seen him - on the rare occasions he could be separated from the work to come and meet you and his other friends - carrying this as yet unrealised book around with him everywhere, his shoulders buckling beneath it as it grew. Imagine that you know about the deadline - not quite Korolev's for Sputnik II, but a tight one all the same - and the workload it entailed; the cramming and the topsy turvy schedule of avoiding working in the hottest parts of that heat wave two summers back. Think of him as if he was your friend working through the nightimes, asleep in the shimmering heat of the day. You too, let's pretend, have been told, that it took some special power, the interjection of some ghoulish muse to see the project through; one intense and frazzled nocturne when that spectral lady spoke through him; our friend.
So now I recline in the comfy berth of my Dacha, filled with pride and party loyalty as my delicate, unscathed fingers turn over a week or two of someone else's work. The story I've waited so long to hear finally can unfold. And this is why I can't be trusted. Because my faith was always infinite. Because I knew from the very first moment that the idea was put to me, from the simple, nailed up manifesto of the outline of the plot, that the compassion and the talent of my friend had this time found the perfect vehicle in Laika's moving tale. No, that's wrong; it is the other way around. The tale had found the man with the humanity to tell it. And even though I know I can't be trusted, that my testimony won't stand up, I will say it anyway. The tale has found the talent and the compassion to be told. Trust me, even though there's no way on earth that I could not like this book. Trust me, even if I'm drunk with pride at having had the good luck to have such a friend; Trust me, it is good. Very, very good indeed.
Of course, you can't believe me; not until you've read it for yourself. You can only trust the hairs on the back of your own neck, as I had to mine, feel them as they respectfully stand up for the eloquence of the frames and the text, a politburo of filaments rising in awe at the powerful arsenal that proceeds before them. You may or may not feel, as I did, the reassuring thrill that comes when official history is met by such a calm, interrogative conscience as Nick's; a punk cartoonist's two-fingered rejoinder to their "mad parade". You see, history may record that a dog named Laika became the first living being to reach outer space in the early hours of 2nd November, 1957, but that's only a fragment of the story that Nick tells here.
Even now, having read the book and knowing what we do of the Soviet regime, it's hard not to be impressed by the force of Korolev's will. A driven "man of destiny", he'd survived the hell of the gulag to pioneer the exploration of space. In the month between the outrageous coup of the first Sputnik and Laika's flight, he'd made the quantum leap between hurtling an object and a being into space, a development that would pave the way for all that followed in space race. But that miracle of a month was to be the little dog's tragedy; they simply hadn't time to plot a way to bring her back to earth. Korolev is plausibly humane in Nick's hands; this is no witch hunt after all, just a wise reckoning of motives a balancing of the scales. In other hands this could be sad but sloppy propaganda. But Nick is far too wise for that.
We see Korolev and the other humans in this story (and the canines they are masters of) as vital, living beings who have been made stooges by history. They are liberated from their role as muppets here. Characters like Yelana Dubrovsky, the dog-handler who bonds with her charges and Oleg Gazenko (whose unrequited passion for the same Yelana Alexandrovna is so beautifully, subtly, delicately suggested here) can't be seen as villains. They're victims, as we all are, of the propagandists' vice. The insistence of the regime that the launch of this boastful orbit be made to coincide with the anniversary of the Revolution meant that no plans were ever made to return poor Laika to that despairing, undeserving soil; one more shoddy tragedy to add to the millions more suffered under that regime. The poor pup's passion unfolds with terrible certainty. The author's vision remains clear-eyed throughout, remaining so even as your own blurs with tears as you read on. You can't believe it's just a colour-filled line that's died up there in the heavens, in torment, not put to sleep humanely as the Soviet's pretended. Another dead line. But it isn't a line, it is a dog that's died. A dog and a lie; sometimes it takes a white lie to tell the bigger truth.
But don't trust me, you can't I am too close to the story. Rather, trust the text and, if you have them, show it to your kids. It will stand them in good stead. Because they will need, and their kids will need, as we once needed, perhaps still do, to guard against the propaganda. It hasn't gone away, just becomes ever harder to pick up on. But Laika and Kudryavka, the little curly-tailed stray dog remembered in its pages, show us how it's done.
"Laika" By Nick Abadzis is published by First Second. You can order a copy here.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
"We'll keep the blue flag flying here": Comrade Abadzis inspects the newly renovated Stamford Bridge.
We've known each other since about 1979. He delights in reminding me that my first words to him were "I hate you, Nick Abadzis". I'm fairly sure he's making it up, although I always was a contrary thing, even way back then, so maybe a I did say something along those lines. But regardless of that, sometime in 1980 or 1981, I stopped hating him for long enough (if I ever had in the first place) to realise that I actually liked him rather a lot. Sitting in a tree in Richmond Park whilst on a Biology field trip, we became friends and we've pretty much stayed like that for what will soon be thirty years - friends, that is, we're not still sitting up a tree in Richmond Park.
So that, before we go any further, is my declaration of interest. Nick's just had another book published and on Sunday I had the great pleasure of finally getting to read it. Laika is the story of the second Soviet space flight. The brainchild of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Sputnik I had been launched on October 4th, 1957, beep-beeping to the consternation and bemusement of the non-Communist world below its orbit. Sputnik II's preparation was cruelly cut short, scheduled as it was to be launched to coincide with the fortieth anniverary of the October Revolution. This project was to go one step further than Sputnik I. This time Korolev's team would send not just a beep generator but a living creature into orbit. The catch was, they only had a month to build the thing from scratch. Now *that's* a deadline.
Laika was the heroic Husky-Samoyed crossbreed chosen to pioneer the mammalian (and Soviet) conquest of the universe stretched out enticingly beyond the earth's atmosphere. Only her name wasn't really Laika. Everyone called Kudryavka - "Little Curly" - until Korolev changed her name; Laika, 'Barker'. Sergei Pavlovich's life had been saved by a dog as he wandered the streets of Magadan, starving from his ordeal in the gulag, alerted by its barking to a discarded loaf of bread. This meeting with another, curly-tailed dog was, he believed, like his survival a proof of his destiny; at least it was if you believe Nick's story. Oh, I know telling stories is telling lies, but sometimes we need a white lie or two to get behind the even bigger lies. The lies we're told by history.
You've had my declaration of interest, but interest seems barely to do the bias involved here sufficient justice. You see, no matter how much you might not want to, when you hold in your hands a book by one of your friends, you are discreetly cordoned off from the huddled masses of the general readership. "Come this way", say the voices of the genuflecting flunkies as they lead you on your red carpetted way. Far from the harrassed and cramped readers hanging from their handrails in economy they take you; for this one rare journey you will be travelling in first class. You may indeed be holding the same 208 pages as any other reader in your eager, trembling hands, but this is one privilege you are unable to renounce. For you belong to The Party now, you are no longer a mere prole, and with that elevation there comes danger. You are no ordinary reader because you know. You know as they do not that what you are holding in your hands are not mere pages; they are years.
So how can you trust a Party man? I wouldn't trust myself. But you will just have to trust me, as little Kudryavka has no choice but to trust her handler, Yelana Dubrovsky, even though she is ultimately powerless to reward her charge's faith. Trust me, even though this will read, I know, like propaganda - how can it not? But try to see it from the propagandist's p.o.v. Imagine that you too have seen him - on the rare occasions he could be separated from the work to come and meet you and his other friends - carrying this as yet unrealised book around with him everywhere, his shoulders buckling beneath it as it grew. Imagine that you know about the deadline - not quite Korolev's for Sputnik II, but a tight one all the same - and the workload it entailed; the cramming and the topsy turvy schedule of avoiding working in the hottest parts of that heat wave two summers back. Think of him as if he was your friend working through the nightimes, asleep in the shimmering heat of the day. You too, let's pretend, have been told, that it took some special power, the interjection of some ghoulish muse to see the project through; one intense and frazzled nocturne when that spectral lady spoke through him; our friend.
So now I recline in the comfy berth of my Dacha, filled with pride and party loyalty as my delicate, unscathed fingers turn over a week or two of someone else's work. The story I've waited so long to hear finally can unfold. And this is why I can't be trusted. Because my faith was always infinite. Because I knew from the very first moment that the idea was put to me, from the simple, nailed up manifesto of the outline of the plot, that the compassion and the talent of my friend had this time found the perfect vehicle in Laika's moving tale. No, that's wrong; it is the other way around. The tale had found the man with the humanity to tell it. And even though I know I can't be trusted, that my testimony won't stand up, I will say it anyway. The tale has found the talent and the compassion to be told. Trust me, even though there's no way on earth that I could not like this book. Trust me, even if I'm drunk with pride at having had the good luck to have such a friend; Trust me, it is good. Very, very good indeed.
Of course, you can't believe me; not until you've read it for yourself. You can only trust the hairs on the back of your own neck, as I had to mine, feel them as they respectfully stand up for the eloquence of the frames and the text, a politburo of filaments rising in awe at the powerful arsenal that proceeds before them. You may or may not feel, as I did, the reassuring thrill that comes when official history is met by such a calm, interrogative conscience as Nick's; a punk cartoonist's two-fingered rejoinder to their "mad parade". You see, history may record that a dog named Laika became the first living being to reach outer space in the early hours of 2nd November, 1957, but that's only a fragment of the story that Nick tells here.
Even now, having read the book and knowing what we do of the Soviet regime, it's hard not to be impressed by the force of Korolev's will. A driven "man of destiny", he'd survived the hell of the gulag to pioneer the exploration of space. In the month between the outrageous coup of the first Sputnik and Laika's flight, he'd made the quantum leap between hurtling an object and a being into space, a development that would pave the way for all that followed in space race. But that miracle of a month was to be the little dog's tragedy; they simply hadn't time to plot a way to bring her back to earth. Korolev is plausibly humane in Nick's hands; this is no witch hunt after all, just a wise reckoning of motives a balancing of the scales. In other hands this could be sad but sloppy propaganda. But Nick is far too wise for that.
We see Korolev and the other humans in this story (and the canines they are masters of) as vital, living beings who have been made stooges by history. They are liberated from their role as muppets here. Characters like Yelana Dubrovsky, the dog-handler who bonds with her charges and Oleg Gazenko (whose unrequited passion for the same Yelana Alexandrovna is so beautifully, subtly, delicately suggested here) can't be seen as villains. They're victims, as we all are, of the propagandists' vice. The insistence of the regime that the launch of this boastful orbit be made to coincide with the anniversary of the Revolution meant that no plans were ever made to return poor Laika to that despairing, undeserving soil; one more shoddy tragedy to add to the millions more suffered under that regime. The poor pup's passion unfolds with terrible certainty. The author's vision remains clear-eyed throughout, remaining so even as your own blurs with tears as you read on. You can't believe it's just a colour-filled line that's died up there in the heavens, in torment, not put to sleep humanely as the Soviet's pretended. Another dead line. But it isn't a line, it is a dog that's died. A dog and a lie; sometimes it takes a white lie to tell the bigger truth.
But don't trust me, you can't I am too close to the story. Rather, trust the text and, if you have them, show it to your kids. It will stand them in good stead. Because they will need, and their kids will need, as we once needed, perhaps still do, to guard against the propaganda. It hasn't gone away, just becomes ever harder to pick up on. But Laika and Kudryavka, the little curly-tailed stray dog remembered in its pages, show us how it's done.
"Laika" By Nick Abadzis is published by First Second. You can order a copy here.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
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