Volavérunt

We made it. Everything had been stacked against us: physics, gravity, reality, Switzerland, and most of all ourselves. But here we are, present for duty and ready to comment.

I assembled a crack squad of Guardian commentators to lead the assault on Mrs Boyo's bank vault via the west face of Lake Geneva:

• Francis Wheen - my captain, the calm voice of measured liberalism and informed Marxisant critique, equipped with the patrician ability to cow the trolls.
• Charlie Brooker - the acerbic sergeant-major, with his thumb pressed firmly on the jugular of the Zeitgeist.
• Neil Clark - well, he had a compass in the heel of his shoe and a torch that lit up Wheen's dome like Venus rising. Plus he said he could speak Swiss.
  

The trolls divided into two main groups.

• The first lot wanted to know why we were "keeping silent about aparthied Isreal's role" in our kidnapping. They deployed sarcasm and texting acronyms.
  
• The second crew insisted that our escape plan was a false flag operation by the "Bush junta to justefy its genecidal war ag. Iran".

Fringe groups claimed we'd not been kidnapped at all, and produced photographs that allegedly showed missiles attached to Brooker's undercarriage.

Some simply called for our escape committee to declare solidarity with Venezuela and wear orange Gitmo jump suits. Three followers of David Icke said I was a lizard but tagged along anyway, casually offering me insects from time to time.

Everyone felt we ought to understand Russia's position more.

It took a while, but Queen's Regulations, invocation of "Che!" and Clark's recital of his favourite parts of Dad's Army licked this rabble into the finest body of fighting men ever to have littered the website of a left-liberal newspaper with misspelled anti-Semitic rants and random comments about "AmeriKKKa".

Years of monomania, pathetic delusions and crouching over their computers in darkened rooms had adapted many of the trolls to burrowing work - their moleish tunnel vision, incisors enlarged by tearing open packs of durritos, and ample supplies of self-belief and body fat had them gnawing through the subterranean walls of Creditgewalt Ruthenien AG in no time.

They were helped along by Capt Wheen's stirring speech, in which he mentioned that Mrs Boyo had backstage passes to the Geneva 2009 UN World Conference against Racism stacked in the vault.

What we saw when we finally broke through was almost more than human sanity can bear. Squatting on a throne of miners' helmets was the bejewelled, henna'ed, deranged majesty of Seamus Milne.

He rose slowly, and we fell back in horror against a tide of cowering trolls. He raised his bangled glove and all fell silent. Then he spoke.

"Howl ye, mortals, for the day of the Milne is at hand! First, we shall ask Osama in as guest editor again, and all you trolls shall dance and laugh and comment and agree with one another! Vorwärts!"

At this he rushed towards the hole in the floor of the Earth, the trolls swarming around his habit.

But then, as he was about to launch himself into the inky ether, the three Ickeans seized his wings:

"O Dark Hero, it's a trap! Bush, the Queen and the Rothschilds will make you their scaly minion. We shan't let you go!"

They dragged Milne down into the depths of the lake. The last light of Wheen's pate glanced off his cheekbones as he sank back into the murk from which he had never fully emerged. His last cry was "Curse you, Blair!" It's what he would have wanted.

We survivors parted in the bank lobby, where an understanding under-manager said he would be speaking to Mrs Boyo about keeping "vilde chayos" in their vaults.

I will always remember these brave men - Wheen, Brooker, Clark, Benjy, LaRoucher, zionhater18, 911truthgrrl, cocoen, usslibertyfacts67, gummiknabe - all of them played their part.

We know we can never tell our story, but rest content that he saved both sides of the Earth from a loathsomeness that would have put every teachers' staff room in the land at its decayed command.

Dark Side of the Earth

Kidnapped by Flat-Earthers!

I'm being held on the underside of the Alps, which is very deep and dark. It's where The Guardian keeps the Comment Is Free trolls and most contributors.

There's a few of us down here working on a plan. If we can scale the inside of this lake we ought to make it into Mrs Boyo's bank vault somewhere in Geneva.

Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.

Watch With Boyo III

We've been away for a few days, so without any further ado I return to the important business of listing films in no particular order.

Ninth Night: Quatermass and the Pit

I'd rather have the 1950s TV series, but that would be cheating. It was the best thing the BBC did before giving me a job.

The 1960s Hammer film doesn't have the relentless build-up of the original, but also skips its occasional preachiness.

The ending, with Quatermass and his female assistant unable to speak across the space between them in the ruins of London, is one of the most powerful in postwar British cinema, genre movie or no genre movie.

It's all up on YouTube, but here's the section that includes the cleansing of the Martian hives (at '1"30):



Key quotation: Minister: "Do you know what you're implying? That we owe our human condition to the intervention of insects!"


Tenth Night: Night of the Generals

This is a fine example of the early 70s international production, in which the actors of Europe united to ham it up in languages they didn't understand for some Italian director like Visconti.

These films were always epics of miscasting, and Night of the Generals doesn't disappoint with Omar Sharif as a German intelligence officer.

The film sustains remarkable dramatic tension throughout, even though it's clear who done it from the moment you set eyes on the bat-kicking insanity that is Peter O'Toole's General Tanz.

Indeed, it makes Visconti's The Damned look like a monkey waving a ribbon in the rain.

Here's Pete, mad as a badger:



Key quotation: Gen Tanz: "Are you wearing perfume?"
Major Grau: "'I occasionally wear a light after-shave, sir."

Eleventh Night: Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

Luvvie alert: I first saw this film at Kinotsentr in Moscow while a student, in a presentation by the magnificent critic Naum Kleiman. It has stayed with me ever since.

It entered Lang's personal mythology in a story that Goebbels banned it on release in 1933, then invited Fritz to come and work for him at the Propaganda Ministry. Lang said he'd sleep on it, promptly packed his bags and fled with his family to Paris. Not true, but I'm happy to print the legend.

It's Fritz Lang's second talkie after M, and he uses sound to original effect. The visuals are still eerie, in particular the car chase with a spectral Mabuse as a literal backseat driver.

It wasn't Lang's conscious intention to comment on the Nazis, as far as I can tell, but Mabuse's control over the doctor serves as a prophetic warning against those who gamble on Fascism.



Key quotation: Dr Mabuse whispering stuff.

Twelfth Night: The Wicker Man

Let's start off as we begin to end, with altruistic criticism:

It's not as good as its fans claim. The Britt Ekland body double is the acme of embarrassment in a sex scene that features the first use of a wall as a contraceptive barrier. No version of the film is entirely adequate, although the 1980s BBC cut come closest in restoring cut scenes without the clumsy occassional voiceover and the pre-credits mainland passage.

Having said that, I love this film more than any pig. Every phrase uttered by Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle is a gem. The music is glorious, and there is something genuinely touching about the way the pagans are so comfortable in their skins.

It is the sort of movie that yields something new with each viewing. I'd seen it several time before I noticed the sly acknowledgement in the opening credits to Lord Summerisle for his cooperation in the making of the film.

Truly, the sacrifice had been reverenced.

Sioba Siencyn maintains that this song is based on the Welsh druidic classic "O Bren Braf". Judge for yourselves:



Key quotation: Lord Summerisle, as Christian copper fumes at the sight of bare-ass dancing ladies: "Good afternoon, Sergeant Howie. I trust the sight of the young people refreshes you."

I hope you enjoyed my selection. AS Ordovicius named four, so shall I name the same. Those chosen to come up with their own list of twelve cracking fillums are:

Gorilla Bananas
Gadjo Dilo
MC Ward
Gyppo Byard

They will receive the summons shortly.

Lost Horizon

The mighty Counterknowledge site has done the world another favour by reminding us that the Flat Earth Society is still there, holding aloft the stationary disc of Truth.

Flat-Earthers, as the site points out, do not like the name being used as a term of media abuse like Tory, Zionist or White Working Class. Let us call them Horizoneers.

Horizoneers are not pudgy Kennedy Grassyknollers or goateed 9/11 Truthers. The latter can spin a skein of half-truths into a sticky candyfloss blob that threatens to engulf all Mankind and the Intern Net, like Prof Quatermass's Experiment.

TV presenters, actors, Willie Nelson, Robert Fisk - in short, the people we've learned to emulate since the demise of non-Islamic religions and universities that teach stuff - they're all suddenly "just asking questions" about explosions controlled by giant owls from the Bilderberg Group etc.

Not Horizoneers. They don't need to pervert simple truths to their own sick ends. They have dignity. They simply ignore everything that suggests the world isn't a circle without a beginning. Physics - out. Australia - it's somewhere else and full of liars. Planes - they go round and round. The Moon - it's just tethered off Holyhead. Google Earth - shove it up your arse.

(Except that The Flat Earth Society would never be so demotic in public. Its members belong to that select group of people who still write "whilst". Other members include Sir John Major, Daily Mail letter writers and members of the British National Party who like to be naked at the computer.)

Horizoneers pass the Crimea Test. If faced with having to charge into their own Valley of Death, Truthers and other conspirators would suddenly recall serious misgivings they've always had about their ratfaced little theories and run honking from both ends into the embrace of orthodoxy. Not the Horizoneers. They'd ride straight in. That's why they are magnificent.

I once lost an argument with the Dolgellau Branch of The Flat Earth Society (Cymdeithas Y Ddaear Wastad) at the bar of the Cross Keys, considered the town's intellectual hub because of the gravitational pull of the neighbouring Free Library (closed 1978). Les Maip Môn, a retired lead thief from Anglesey, set out the disky case succinctly:

"A Harrier jump jet takes off over Dolgellau, and hovers. If the Earth and Moon are spinning about like a pair of bollocks in a washing machine like Boyo Junior says, pilot just has to sit tight and he'll travel all over the shop without moving. But, because they're flat, he'll not move from Dolgellau. Case closed, your round."

(Les thinks the Moon is also flat. Hardcore.)

I tried in vain to counter this, but felt like Patrick Moore in a roomful of headhunters. I went for a little walk, came back, and decided they were probably right.

Horizoneers don't "just ask questions", they provide the answers. And that, in this modern world in which we're living in, is a rare commodity.

Watch With Boyo II

Continuing Ordovicius's challenge to programme twelve nights of cinematic salubrity:







Fifth Night: Seven Days in May

Shakespeare was a bald-headed Brummie, but if he had been alive and employed as John Frankenheimer's scriptwriter in the 1960s, he would have given us this film. A troubled king of a divided his realm, a military leader scheming in the wings, an officer torn by loyalties, a woman ill-used, a Southern Falstaff, and meaty speeches about stuff that matters - it's all here in the best political thriller ever.

Less pantomime that the Manchurian Candidate and years ahead of the paranoid wave of the early 70s, Seven Days in May gives us some of the hottest Burt-on-Kirk action ever filmed. Plus Ava Gardner. Not much of it on the Intern Net, but here's a slice:



Key quotation: Col Casey: "Yes, I know who Judas was. He was a man I worked for and admired until he disgraced the four stars on his uniform."

Sixth Night: The Innocents

The perfect adaptation of the perfect novella, Jack Clayton's version of "The Turn of the Screw" lines up Truman Capote on script and Freddie Francis on cameras in a masterpiece of creepy ambiguity. The corruption of children is handled with emotional economy, as are the shocks. Miss Jessel seems to seep into your vision when she appears to the governess across the lake. And Jason King is Peter Quint! Rather.



Key quotation: Flora: "Can tortoises swim?"
Governess: "No, they cannot."
Flora: (removing tortoise from lake) "I thought not."

Seventh Night: Withnail & I

The closest thing British men have to a religion, with its script a liturgy and its protagonists saints fit for emulation. It was almost worth having to put up with the Beatles just so George Harrison had enough money to produce this slice of modern Chaucer.

Is it about friendship, love, growing-up, drinking, farmers? The K Man knows Ralph Brown - he who played Danny the drug dealer - and says it's about acting. Enjoy it before students on the Oxford train quote it to death. My favourite scene is the night at the country pub, about 1'25" into this clip:



Key quotation: "We've gone on holiday by mistake!"

Eighth Night: Vampyr

Carl Dreyer is largely to blame for the French making films like Last Year in Marienbad, and this earliest bid in the lesbian-vampire stakes (it's meant to be based on Le Fanu's Carmilla) is where it all began. Sets bathed in light to disorient the viewer. Characters who enter frames out of the corner of your eye. Multiple points of view. Shadows have lives of their own.

There's little dialogue, no lesbian action and very little vampirism. Dreyer set out to create a sense of dread and decay, and he succeeded. Relish this exquisite corpse:




Key quotation: (indistinct)

Sleep tight.

Watch With Boyo I

Compiling lists is a male activity, except for the shopping list I artfully doctor once a week, so it's no coincidence that champion web blogger and future President of Wales Ordovicius is a man.

He has tagged me and four other slackers with assembling a 12-night Hefneresque film fest. Feeling like a London Underground train, I've nonetheless come up with a festering fortnight of film with a two-day break to buy pies, beer and visit your loved ones.

Reading back through my cinelogue I was struck by how much I like black and white stuff, creepy or otherwise. I put this down to my Welshness - Wales is a country that went colour only in 1982 and still runs a Best Kept Graveyard competition.

I'll account for the films four at a time, so as not to take up too much room. As Tom Verlaine sang: "l'étreinte jalouse et le spasme obsesseur/Ne valent pas un long baiser, même qui mente!"

First night: Daughters of Darkness

One for the ladies. The lesbian-vampire genre is much-maligned by bitter blondes, but this one might just convert them. It should also extend my kink-based visitor profile in an agreeable new direction. It does for Belgian coastal resorts out of season what MR James did for Suffolk.

Key quotation: "You should have seen him in Bruges. He looked so fascinated by death".



Second Night: Dead of Night

Up there with The Third Man and all of the Powell and Pressburger oeuvre at the British film-making dockyard in the 1940s, Dead of Night launched the portmanteau horror film genre that bobbed around bravely in the choppy waters of Lake Amicus before sinking with all hands. It is, as top Welsh actor Mervyn Johns says, "A nightmare of horror", and everyone smokes and drinks the whole time. Excellent.

No clips available anywhere, so here's a still from the best segment - The Mirror. The moment when Googie Withers sees the other room in the glass still has the power to shock.


Key quotation: (Sally O'Hara): "Mummy, you mustn't! You see, Mr. Craig's going to hit me - savagely!"

(Mrs O'Hara): "Oh, well, I'm sure he can hit somebody else instead. Now, come along, dear!"


Third Night: It Happened Here

Give a young British director a grant these days and you'll get another retread of Guy Ritchie's It's A Right Royal Cockney Barrel of Monkeys. Schoolboys Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo and their chums had 3/6d and some old Kubrick film stock, and they produced the true story of the Nazi occupation of England.

Even the amateurish acting gives it the authentic feel of a wartime documentary. The clip of real British fascist Colin Jordan in uniform having a cosy chat about whether to send the Jews to Madagascar may remind you of the readers' views on the Guardian's Comment Is Free site, but the rest of this unheroic and unsettling film is not like anything you've seen before.

Again, no video clips, but here's a cheery pic.



Key quotation: (The Doctor): "The appalling thing about fascism is that you've got to use fascist methods to get rid of it."



Fourth Night: Animal House

To change the mood a little, here a film that pulls US fratboy comedies inside out like the baboon in Cronenberg's "The Fly". More than a series of excellent set pieces, it has a number of pleasing story arcs. It also has Mrs Wormer, whom I still fancy, and Bluto's "What's all this sitting around shit?" speech - which ought to be taught somewhere.

On a personal note, vacuum perversion sleuth Andy Wislen studied at the University of Oregon, where it was filmed, and a friend of mine called Elizabeth is the girl walking past the library in the opening sequence.

Key quotation: "You fucked up - you trusted us!"



Keep watching the screens.

Awaiting the call

I became a father some time ago, but still await the call to be a Dad.

It is clear to me that, once the congratulatory perfumes of cigar and single malt have faded, an avuncular chap will come and tap you on the shoulder.

He may be a host at a party, or perhaps your wine merchant. Certainly someone you think you've known for a while. Whenever it happens, you'll know your time has come. He will take you aside to say that you must become a Dad.

And you'll know just what he means. Think of your own father. An apparently random assembly of tobacco and Brown Windsor soup, held together by cardigans and fuelled by National Service anecdotes, he was and is nonetheless remarkable.

He could fix things with a stick, find his way around foreign places with no knowledge of language or geography, converse easily with women without scaring them, restrain other people's children without artillery or facing a summons, and inhabited a circle of "mates" who were always there when he needed them - and vice versa:

"Blast! Car's sunk under water and caught fire again. (beep beep) Jack! Fancy seeing you here? Yup, that submarine with the winch and fireblanket you've just bought might do the job. And you've a pheasant and some boules? What a turn-up for the Boyo trousers!"

It was, as TASS news agency used to intone when faced with another bourgeois obstacle to the spastic lurch of the Soviet, "no accident" that fatherhood turned a gormless fantasist into a blinding social success, crafstman and child-tamer. He had been inducted into the Antient Order of the Dad.

After initial contact is made at the humidor/sheep market/cottaging spot, the new father starts popping out once a week for a couple of pints "now that the kid's sleeping ok", and begins to acquire the Starry Knowledge at the Esoteric Lodge of the Dad.

There he will receive the tiny gem that, embedded in watch-face, tie pin, tooth (in the case of our Romany brethren) or signet ring (in the case of people who really ought not to be allowed to sire children at all) marks the bearer as a "friend of ours".

One glint and he has access to the keys that mend broken toys, a discreet ulra-sonic device that permits faultless reverse parking, the gigolo's combination of words and gestures that dupes women and large dogs into thinking they can trust you, and the look that tells any child "One false step and I tell Miss Kilgore who put the crab in her aquarium".

It's obvious when you think about it. My father came to visit me and my then young lady in Oxford. He nipped upstairs to relieve himself and, it seems simultaneously, fixed the cistern, changed a washer on the tap and re-attached the shower head.

A glance about the garden had him prune a bush, find a Spanish doubloon and win over the neighbour who hadn't spoken to us since our Varèse With Bongos party.

Other contemporaries have confirmed this. A later lady friend had lived in Vienna for years, spoke passable German and naturally still struggled with the trip-wire etiquette of the Austrians. Her father turned up from Liverpool and declared "I'm off to get some sausages". His daughter explained that sausage mean salami in the Habsburg realm, and wished him luck.

Thirty minutes later he declared "I found a master butcher, went in, and explained what I wanted. He'll have the bangers ready by four." And they were. Our attempts to repeat this feat led to solicitor's letters. We were not Dads.

All falling into place, is it? I feel like those Watergate blokes when they realised it was Nixon all along, except I'm right.

Yet I'm still awaiting the call. I've not had the hand on the shoulder, the tap on the wrist or, for all I know, the palm gently cupping my nads in the gents at John Lewis. What have I done wrong? Why isn't it my time? Why can't I open jars? How long can my neighbour's wife keep hiding behind that bush?

Perhaps it's because I've worked it out. And let on.

"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."

Love and Human Remains

Gyppo Byard's tale of knackersnagging brings to mind my old chum Andy Wislen.

Byard's punctured pods have rarely served as a point of departure for anything other than his brood of changelings, and I won't go the whole Proust either - although my association with Wislen was one of the most intense and significant alliances in the history of beret-clad freestyle drinking.

Suffice to say that Wislen, an adopted Canadian, killed some time before college chalking up life experience as an auxiliary with the then Metro Toronto Ambulance service.

North American universities believe that a month or two spent hindering medical staff makes for a better student, whereas we older nations know that using Thai tribesmen as bongs or steering your dad's car into local hedges is the ideal preparation for three years of scholarly inquiry and that job at the Vowel Prevention Agency of Wales.

The phlegmatic Canadians knew better than to let Wislen administer muscle relaxants to young ladies or take bottles of ether home with him, but they did allow the bushy thug out on calls to take notes, use the phone and assemble the mountains of doughnuts and pierogies that serve as food up there.

On one occasion he and the grown-up ambulance men were summoned to the house of a pallid chap who greeted them in his overalls. Some coy questioning revealed that he'd suffered lacerations to his glans, allegedly inflicted during some unwise and quite acrobatic car maintenance.

As Ambulator One questioned the victim in the hallway, Ambulator Two drew Wislen's attention to a vacuum cleaner slumped on the living-room floor like an odalisque on a pile of Ottoman princelings.

Number One told the pervert that he'd have to come to hospital for some serious shvantz stitching, and that they would need to inform his next of kin.

"Is that strictly necessary?" whimpered the beast.

"Given what you did to yourself with an imaginary stationary car, it's best that your loved ones (non-mechanical) know you're about to spend time in a building full of electrical wires, sharp metal and broomhandles," said Number Two, or words to that effect.

After some mewling, countered by graphic descriptions of bollock rot and Shaven Urethra Syndrome, the unnatural creature gave Wislen his wife's work number.

Trying not to imagine the Gorgon that would drive a man to such bellendery, Wislen dialled the number and asked for Mrs McSicko.

He explained who he was, and that her husband's oil-change misadventure meant a few hours at Toronto General dodging a big needle.

"Has he been dicking around with the vacuum again?" sighed the dear lady.

As a journalist, I investigated this story by the standard procedure of putting "bloke", "knob" and "vacuum" into the Intern Net. I found many well-sourced stories of men and at least one mum-of-three lying with a Hoover as with a woman.

This was an eerie experience, as most of my visitors arrive by kink-oriented searches anyway. Now I've unwittingly added domestic-appliance molesters to my one-handed readership profile.

Such statistics prompt me to think Wislen was not spinning a yarn, despite the bearded bastard's lifetime of bravura fibs (eg he helped to overthrow Milosevic years before it happened but "they" kept it quiet, he has pre-birth memories of at least one Kennedy Assassination, disobliging masseuses are in the employ of the Vietnamese Communist Party etc).

Have you come across an apparent urban myth only to find it might well be true?

Have you ever covered the Dyson in a moment of sherry-fuelled anomie?

If so, tell all - there might be a Channel 4 show in it for us.

My Universities: Advertising

I graduated from University College Swansea (formerly the Swansea Jack public house) with a good degree in Bat Maintenance and Ruthenian Studies and have acted as if the world owed me a living ever since.

This attitude was entrenched a few years later when I found out that I could have spent a bit of cash and got myself a business masters with a guaranteed livelihood of hoovering cocaine out of geishas' navels on behalf of some spicily sinister Oriental corporation.

Among the careers I toyed with was advertising. I had been reared as a polished sociopath, so a job devoted to mocking the potato-faced British consumer in return for cupboards full of Krugerrands and posh girls seemed ideal.

The idea came to me one deep winter in Hendrefoelan, a student internment camp half a mile from the village of Killay in the clouds above Swansea.

Veteran leech piper Ward Cooper and I had marvelled at the uselessness of the TV advert for Start breakfast cereal. This consisted of Geordie athlete Steve Cram running up a glum fell somewhere, eating a bowl of Start on a drizzly ridge, then sprinting back down to Northern civilisation in his cagoule.

A heavy snowfall had led to panic buying, so by the time we'd trudged through the drifts to the local Coop for our weekly non-booze-and-fags shopping trip all that was left on the shelves was dog food, cat litter and row upon row of boxes of Start. After much soul-searching we bought two boxes of Start and some cat litter, just in case.

The checkout girl eyed us wistfully. We were good customers, and she would probably never see us alive again.

The jam-breathed locals of Killay were as surly a bunch of Morlocks as I'd ever met outside my immediate family circle, but no one could fault their almost-Martian survival instinct. Without wishing to offend the evil bastards at Kelloggs in any way*, Start was vile.

The recipe may have changed since 1984, of course. Perhaps consumer focus groups fed back some mood music about public disdain for sugar and damp cheeese lovingly infused into foam rubber. Who knows. By the time the snows had melted we were already pouring tabasco on the cat litter and pooling our ear wax.

Once the fever had passed, Ward and I retired to our chambers with two bottles of Don Darias and started work on a realistic advertising campaign for Start. Rather than avoiding the issue of its taste, as did the Cram ad, we decided to make its rankness a selling point.

The mid-80s were a puritanical time for the university left. Thatch was firmly in power, the Labour Party had taken a sabbatical from politics, the Socialist Workers were still harassing miners rather than concentrating on their natural constituency of creepy trustafarian students and suicide bombers, and women didn't have the vote.

The only outlet for the Roundhead tendency was in self-mortification. This meant listening to Paul Weller, pretending to fancy girls in leggings, and watching Newsnight. Ward and I felt that we could pitch Start to this drab demographic.

The campaign was simple. A 5-second guerrilla-style TV advert would burst onto your screen as if interrupting normal broadcasting. It consisted of a handheld camera three-quarters shot of pantomime socialist Dennis Skinner MP, The Beast of Bolsover. He would brandish an arms-length box of said cereal at the camera and bark "Eat Start, It's Shit!"

And that's it. No posters, nothing. Sociology students would be shovelling the stuff past their keffiyehs within weeks, we estimated.

At least that's the pitch we made in a letter to Kelloggs. A letter we unwisely wrote that very night and mailed to what I hope was the wrong address. Cornflake Superhero Captain Kellogg (if such he be) never deigned to reply.

I expect the letter is still whirling around in the seventh circle of the Post Office sorting room reserved for rifled birthday cards and anything with an official stamp addressed to the Kinnocks.

Disappointed by this lack of response, I slouched off into a career as a third-rate academic. Of which more anon.

(* phrase included on advice of my legal counsel, The K Man)

A bloke is not just for Christmas

Mrs Boyo regrets missing the deadline for a job handling public relations for a donkey sanctuary. I see her point.

The English like donkeys for being comical economy horses, so getting Brits to hand over their money is like setting up a green paint stand outside an eisteddfod. Just show grainy footage of some Spaniards shoving a mule off a church steeple, as I believe is their Papist wont, and the tear-stained coppers flood into your coffers.

The same goes with the ads run on children's TV channels for adopting a dog. Mother of Boyo now corresponds with such a mutt on the strength of manipulative footage of Hounds in Hell.

Said beast is called Beavis in humanspeak - probably Hengist Longclaw, or Bartok the Catslayer in Dogtalk. You just know his tattooed, pin-eyed initial owner originally called him Butthead, and that Dogwatch's equivalent of Mrs Boyo changed his name in the sure knowledge that the four-legged gas bomb would otherwise be heading to the dogfood plant.

(I'm sure we feed dogs to dogs. It makes economic sense and maintains the folk tradition of "Dog eat dog". My legal advisor The K Man is considering whether this is defamatory to various companies. I'll get back to you.)

It occurred to me and my fellow-drinkers that we ought to persuade Mrs Boyo to apply her skills to a similar campaign on behalf of ageing male losers such as ourselves.

The rising callousness index among the young means that there's little chance of their providing for us, and we who've managed to acquire "life" partners fully expect to be jettisoned for younger, less pungent versions during an ill-advised Mediterranean holiday.

The campaign video might run like this:

[Forty-something man in unwise Pete Doherty outfit, staring in confusion at a turnstile]

[Bruised yet resilient female voiceover - perhaps Felicity Kendal or Bonnie Tyler] Griff used to be something like you, until his house sank under water and then caught fire through circumstances largely of his own making. Now he sleeps under a door frame when the pubs shut.

[Same man, peering beyond camera through drizzle]

When it rains, he can't light his Lambert & Butler.

[Man rubbing match against his stubbled head]

But at least his trousers are getting a wash.

[Man: Hey!]

Left to his own devices, Griff and dozens of other borderline derelicts will end up blocking your way into John Lewis, getting stuck in various pieces of street art and leering at you in the taxi rank. And we can't have that.

Is there anything you can do, apart from move to Iran? Yes there is!

For £150 a month, you can keep Griff in a warm and only mildly damp environment, surrounded by friends both real and imaginary.

With your help, we will give him a crumbling terrace house in a no-longer desirable suburb, a short lurch from a chippie and off-licence and a good industrial-estate's distance from your home.

Griff will send you a card at Christmas and a little table he made out of Brains cans, with his picture taped to the top. You'll get a letter each month, not necessarily from Griff, detailing his loveable escapades.

[Clip of same man, sitting at table littered with ashtrays, wine bottles and a cat with a bandaged leg, writing on a blotter. Voiceover in Gwenhwyseg accent: "I dranked a bottle of warm gin last night and got my head stuck in a banister. I used my dribble to free myself, then fell asleep on the stairs!"]

And if your husband's gaze has started to wander, why not let us taxi him over to Griff's for an afternoon of reliving his student years? We'll guarantee that, once he's rediscovered the delights of drinking Don Darias and talking bollocks in a haze of fag smoke, he'll know that one woman is more than enough!

[Clip of once-kempt man in wine-stained shirt, laughing like a twat as Griff makes a sandwich out of teabags]

We believe in helping these drones to help themselves, so Griff or one of his cut-their-own-hair friends will be happy to move into your garden for the summer. He'll keep domestic animals out of your floral borders with his unique musk, while his goat mows your lawn.

He's a novel talking-point for your patio dinners and children's fun days, and only needs a swing to slump in at night.

[Clip of laughing children trying to catch squirrels as they jump out of Griff's trouser-legs, and women in alice bands and their polo-shirted husbands waving from the terrace, oblivious to their water-logged house sinking in flames behind them]

So come on and make a difference. When Griff has that first drink of the day, he'll be sure to toast you!

[Close-up of angular teeth shattering as they tear the cap off a bottle of Champion's Freckled Johnson]

Your task, dear readers, is to come up with a name for the charity described above. The winner will be made an executive director with full Welsh citizenship, and get a virtual office next to Mrs Boyo's.

[Photo courtesy of Dunc and Sioba Siencyn]

Unitam populus Cambrianus unam cervicem haberet!

It's official. According to tubby online batchelors at Wikio, No Good Boyo is the Tenth Welshest Web Blog in the World!

This information was culled and presented by Ordovicius, future President of All Wales and suitor of Mrs Boyo's imaginary sister.

Well, I don't know what to say.

First of all, I'm annoyed to be listed as non-political - this site is devoted to making Wales a Maoist haven for slate-based autarky and slogan-shrieking Urdd child soldiers.

Second, I could not have done it without Mrs Boyo's constant denigration of my friends and very being.

This above all drove me to seek solace in the web community of my thoughts.

Third, a big, hairy-palmed hand to all the self-polluters who boosted my ratings with such searches as 'caroline quentin basque', 'charlote church bukkake', 'brithdir wife swap' and 'glenys kinnock's Moroccan op'.

I owe a great debt to those early readers who've stuck with me through the good times and the bad - like when I forgot what my blog was called and couldn't find it for six months. I'm thinking of Gorilla Bananas and Gyppo Byard in particular.

I'm delighted to have met - or, if you believe Mrs Boyo, to have created in the vortex of my rapidly disintegrating personality - such international playboys and grandes dames distinguées as Ordo himself, MC Ward, Gadjo Dilo and Mrs Pouncer.

Above all, I am proud to have received the recognition of my Silurian peers. If I were to annoy an Uzbek billionaire this evening and have my blog banned by the Old Baileys, my proudest moment would probably have been singlehandedly reviving the singing career of Shakin' Stevens.

Before I blogged, he was loafing around in Peter Kaye videos. Now he's headlining at Glasto, the muddy musicbox of Home Counties whiteboys.

My ambitions for the next two years of blogging? Well, first up, I don't want the celebrity to ruin me. No tabloid rumours about Duffy seen leaving my shed in the early hours, no freebasing Brains and cockles in John Malkovich's hotel. I'm happy with Mrs Boyo and her threats of unnecessary surgical procedures.

Otherwise, I want to clamber up the Wikio Top Ten like a bandwith-drooling zombie until I reign supreme over the deleted comments of mine enemies.

Hwyl!

Elephant Talk

A conversation at The Tethered Goat this lunchtime:

Boyo: You going to The Glade this year?

The K Man: Dunno. Weather was terrible last year. Would've have flooded my wellies if I'd had any. It was like the Somme, man. Like Stalingrad.

Boyo: I think the problem at Stalingrad wasn't the rain so much as the cold.

K Man: Ah, so it wasn't that bad after all!

Boyo: And Von Paulus and his men weren't charged £30 a head for getting in, either.

K Man: Thirty quid!?! More like £125!

All history is contemporary.

The Wounds of Armenia I

Gyppo Byard's heather-hawking Armenian anabasis has reminded me of my long and inglorious association with that fine country.

Although shaped like one of those moulded bed pans men toy with in NHS hospitals, Armenia has everything going for it in terms of attracting a Welsh:

• it, like random chunks of the Amazonian rainforest, is about the size of Wales (see also other fun countries Albania and Israel);
  
  
• The Armenian for "good morning" is "Barry Lewis" (բարի լույս);
  
  
• Their big neighbours are still a source of annoyance, and they don't let you forget it;
  
  
• They used to live on the plains, but are now stuck in some useless mountains;
  
  
• They are short and dark, while their history is long and darker - think of The Crow, but with better music;
  
  
• Their menfolk are largely engaged in loafing and criminality; and
  
  
• Turks killed my great-grandfather at Gallipoli in 1915, the same time as they killed most Armenians' great-grandparents.

There are differences, of course, Armenian women and the weather being the most striking, but these only add to the allure.

As a student at the University of That London in the 80s, I was always on the lookout for ways of funding my Art Pepper way of living (this was the time before lifestyles).

Stints as a ballet impressario and art dealer had brought me deep joy, some cash and the attention of law-enforcement agencies in countries where civil servants wear sunglasses indoors, so male-modelling and sperm donation seemed the next step. Until an academic, whom I shall call Dr Steffan ap Sioncs, advertised for Armenian lessons.

Dr Sioncs was a Welsh, and a specialist on Georgians (the Stalin-boosting wine merchants, not the lynching-prone peanut fanciers or lady-dodging poets) who wanted an insight into the language of their frumpier neighbours. I spoke no Armenian beyond basic greetings, enquiries about alcohol availability and slanders on the Turkic national epic Crazy Dumrul, but possessed guile and a copy of the CIA's marvellous "Spoken Eastern Armenian". We went to work.

I would prepare a lesson the night before my weekly class with Dr Sioncs, and rebuff his polite questions about grammar points and non-spook vocabulary with assurances that he must not harrow his narrow Silurian mind with too much Armenian at this delicate early stage.

I even persuaded him that the Georgians had lifted their spaghetti alphabet from the elegant Mesropian Armenian script rather than from the commonly-received tin of soup. This had the virtue of not being true and of getting him into immense trouble with any Georgians he might want to share it with.

This nonsense went on for months, to the benefit of all. The landlord of the Friend in Hand got his tab paid, Dr Sioncs could order a bottle of prolapse-friendly Zhiguli beer in Yerevan, and any number of distressed young ladies avoided being seeded with frozen shots of Chateau Boyo.

But this was not even the beginning of my dealings with Armenia and its ungrateful denizens. There was a prequel, a sequel, and a tragic coda. Of which more anon.

We Live As We Dream, Alone

Gyppo Byard has pitched his vardo in the lay-by of British womanhood and started hawking the scented heather of Oriental delight.

The lively one-sided debate he provoked raises questions not about the media as the message, but the difficulty of perceiving that message while drinking buckets of soave with your girlfriends in the various chrome-plated bars of English market towns.

"Sex and the City: The Movie" opens in cinemas here this week, and Mrs Boyo is marching her phalanx of the Rosa Luxemburg Sexual Illiteracy Combat Brigade through the piles of empty Thornton's boxes, rosé wine bottles and mascara puddles to pressgang stragglers into the popcorn galleys for what she hopes will be anti-Romaticism aversion therapy.

I fear she may be wrong. I enjoyed the TV series "Sex and the City" as a sort of "Coupling" for simpletons. There is considerable evidence, however, that many lady viewers see it not as a "satire on the self-delusion of gender-based empowerment in late-capitalist society", to quote Mrs Boyo, but rather as a practical guide for the perplexed.

I would therefore suggest that the makers of this and other fine comedy programmes should preface each broadcast with the following message:

"The lives portrayed herein are fictional. Any attempt to spend yours in lunchtime frascati sessions while squealing about orgasms and harrassing waiters will leave you a penniless and lonely lush. You will die in a pool of your own wee in a failed attempt to struggle into a frock designed for a Neapolitan teenager. And - no: gay men do not find you fascinating. They see you as ungainly object lessons in why they made the right choice. Enjoy the show."

It seems the kindest thing they could do.

Stalin Wasn't Stallin'

Mrs Boyo and I start the day with target practice and Radio 4's Today Programme Bingo - combining the two if possible. As respectively a Marxian Spenglerist and a Welsh de Maistrean of reptilian sang froid, we find the consequent rise in blood pressure helps us blend in with the neighbours, while the kitchen-table cries of "House!" remind us of what we're meant to be living in.

Today runs three types of story:

I. Things Today thinks we need to know (global warming, Gaza, what Bono's up to).

II. People doing things that aren't illegal, but which Today thinks ought to be (drinking, smoking).

III. People doing things that are illegal, but which Today thinks have "root causes" (recreational drugs, bombing).

The aim of Today Bingo is to find a story that combines at least two, and ideally all three of these elements. If it then interviews a BBC correspondent to reinforce its point with exquisite solipsism, you've got a full house.

The other morning I was quick to bag a story that sounded promising. The gist was "Naturists are taking teens to their nudy camps, but what if there are paedos about?" It had a strong strain of Element II - naturists are not illegal, but their suburban vulgarity puts them firmly on the Today list of undesirables. I could also stake a claim to Element I, as Today was running stories on "The Kids" all week.

No chance of Element III, I'm glad to say, unless the London media were even more depraved than I'd thought, but two out of three put me well ahead of Mrs Boyo and her Element II bid on the weather forecast (it was snippy about the Home Counties, where Todaythink maintains people ought to be guilty about residing).

But then I realised, with almost toast-crunching horror, that I agreed with an aspect of the item. Naturists - or nudists, to use the technical term - were alright in Carry On films and Sunday Express cartoons, but there remains something suspiciously German and 1920s about them in real life.

I have a list of types who, while not criminal or inherently evil, I would not allow near "The Kids". These are Quakers, vegetarians and Esperantists. Quakers are worthy in a wheaten way, but are Wrong About Everything. Vegetarians deny God's meaty bounty, and dare to be smug about it. Esperantists are usually an intersection of the last two, like in a Venn diagram *.

To that number I now add nudists. The Lord filled Britain with brambles and damp weather, and made our kinfolk lumpy and uneven of tooth. He also granted us the bounty of Scotswomen to weave sturdy tweeds and the colony of Malaya to provide sap for our gumboots, so that we might adapt to the tepid discomforts of these islands.

Not good enough for nudists, apparently. Like Quakers, they think they know better than God. As this is a free country, nudists are free to frolic on the sunkissed beaches of Llanbedr and get bullied on the Today programme like the rest of us, but they set an example of poor taste, self-absorption and blasphemy to our youth.

Mrs Boyo pointed out that Stalin locked up as many Quakers, vegetarians and Esperantists as he could lay his iron fists on, when not distracted by trying to destroy the few clever, well-born and good-looking people who'd survived his mate Lenin. I replied frostily that this argument of guilt by association didn't intimidate me.

Until I understood that she wasn't trying to contradict me at all.

(* Thanks to Scaryduck, for explaining a Venn diagram in response to my gesticulations.)

The Severn Pillows of Wisdom

Back from a bracing week of clouds and tooth decay in Wales, I have the latest news and developments so you don't have to.

1. The government in Cardiff has decided that the English name of the country will henceforth be spelled !Wales!. The idea is to make people think we are not only musical, but a musical. This ought to bring the pink pounds pouring in, and give our homophobe community something to do since the last gays in the villages left to be something in the London media.

2. In order to overcome the North-South divide, the regions of Wales are to be renamed as follows:

• North Wales coast - The Rhylviera


• Rest of North Wales - Mid Wales


• Mid Wales - Middlewales, in order to make the Tolkien-cultists infesting Machynlleth feel at home.


• South-West Wales - Ireland (Tenby will be called Galway and Pembrokeshire West Cork. Having your head slammed in a pub door by the Young Farmers will be known henceforth as "the craic")


• The Valleys - Little Switzerland. Tonypandy will be twinned with Zürich's Needle Park.


• Glamorgan - Westworld.


• Cardiff - The Torchwood.

3. In a similar move, the Welsh language will be rebranded as Gaelic, so no one will be scared of it anymore.

4. The Academi Gymreig, which attempts to regulate the Welsh language, has issued its latest list of words we ought to use instead of just saying English ones with a comic accent. They are:

• Spambot: plastic luncheon-meat holder.


• Charlota: singing bustily.


• Chwerthfawr: laughable.


• Cotseinio: to mark oneself out as a bit of a tool.

The model sentence provided was "Chwydais 'nghinio yn syth yn y spambot wrth glywed Glenys Blydi Kinnock yn ceisio charlota. Chwerthfawr oedd i'w gweld hi yn cotseinio ei hun gymaint."

5. Under family pressure, my brother Annwn has agreed to call his dog Bruno, instead of Duw ffyc aye - his all-purpose greeting.

6. The Senedd has announced the summer list of who is and who isn't currently Welsh. Terry Jones is out, and anyone who 'd like to play for the national football squad is in.

7. Plaid Cymru capo Dafydd Iwan returned No Good Boyo's jaunty greeting on the gristly streets of Dolgellau, and so is assured of both of my votes once again.

Heimatklang

Wales beckons with its six-fingered shuffle, and so the House of Boyo is piling into Old Mossy tomorrow morning for a week of drizzle, feral relatives and nursery food in the ancestral shed in Snowdonia.

Leaves in the dam often leave our hometown with an erratic power supply, as do angry peasants advancing up the hill at midnight, so web blogging may be light. In which case I leave you with the further adventures of Capt Deakin in or near Afghanistan.

As they say in Penarth, ciao for now:

DOWN THE OXUS ON A LOG: PART THE THIRD

The Governor motioned on his map to the blasted deserts north of the Hindoo-Koosh, that God-forsaken arena for the Tournament of Shadows between England and the Russian Bear for the fealty of the petty Amirs and Khans of Toorkistan.

"Things arebeginning to stir up there on the Oxus, Deakin, and it's time for us to strengthen our hand amongst the Pamiri chieftains. We have had reports, disturbing reports, that Cossack patrols from Tashkent are plying the hill-tribes of Wakhan and Kulyab with baubles, jewelled prayer-books and Smith & Wesson repeat-action rifles, not to mention Persian dancing-boys.

"The most worrying intelligence is that Col. Shatkovski is amongst them - no, you buffoon, not the dancing-boys, although Iwouldn't put that past him. He is a master of disguise, seduction, and all the other dark arts of espionage. Fluent inall the local Turki dialects, plus Persian, Pashto and English, he is a most formidable adversary - his greatest weapon being the insight into our own way of thinking he gained from attending a minor public school in Scotland; Dr Shuggie Macleod's Caledonian Academy, I believe.

"There he learnt to survive on salted grits, clad only in a hessian kilt, in extreme cold and almost Trappist silence for his first eighteen years. Part of some absurd exchange programme, it seems, under which we sent twenty pale youths to the Russiacity of Voronezh, a ship-building centre near the Don. They all returned married to Cossack women, and had to be put out of their misery within weeks."

"So you want an expedition to go up there and flog the blazes out of the Pamiris' womenfolk, to show the infidel who's boss of the Himalayas from Assam to Bokhara, eh Sir?" I interrupted enthusiastically. "Problem solved. I'll assemble a raiding party from the Gallant Welshmen of the Fifth, under Lt. Probert, right away, Sir, and show those heathens what fun can be had with three lengths of stout hemp and a selection of melons. Leave it to Deakin, Sir!"

The Governor was silent for a while, moved no doubt by my selfless offer to sacrifice my own men in the glaciers ofthe north. He even had to sit down and hold his head in his hands for a good few minutes, before raising his bloodshot eyes and addressing me again.

"Captain. Shut up and listen to me, or I'll second you to the Army Education Corps. How do you fancy twenty years of teaching literacy and elementary toilet-training to web-fingered East Anglians who pine for the sisters in the Fens? I thought not. Right, this is what you are going to do.

"I have gathered a small party of pundits - natives who know the uncharted Hindoo-Koosh passes and the Pamiri statelets like the back of their hands, and who can pass through the bazaars of Samarkand and Bokhara unnoticed. They are loyal and discreet, and will lead a select group of officers to the Hakim of Bunjikath, who we believe is willing to cut off the Cossacks as they return north from their mission to the Akhund of Basiq-Arvil.

"The Hakim has no love for the Russians, but has as yet no reason to help us either. The aim of our party will be to overtake Shatkovski and his mercenary crew, assure the Hakim of His Majesty's intentions to protect the Pamiris from the Bear's incursions, and promise him all the territories of Basiq-Arvil from the frontier with Kondooz to the Bokharan settlement of Hissar..."

At this point the oppressive heat, compounded by the delayed effects of the previous night's gin-drinking competition with"Fluffy" Tarry in the Mess - I won - conspired to send me into a light doze, but I don't think the Governor noticed.

"Wake up, you slobbering dipsomaniac! Good Lord, I have no more time to waste on you. Listen. You will nominally head the party, because the Russians have never heard of your worthless hide, and because you have the ideal alibi - officially you're dead. If reports of you reach the Russians, they will simply attribute them to native idiocy - moreover, they will never believe that we would entrust such a sensitive mission to a shifty incompetent like you.

"And they will be right. The party will in practice be led by two fine soldiers: Captain Champion of the Kashmiri Rifles, a superb linguist, crack shot and gallant officer, who has led many forays against the Pathans; and by Abdul Khalik, a pundit who is known and respected bythe Hakim of Bunjikath.

"Both men are too well-known to be formally acknowledged as members of the party, and will travel in mufti as traders: Champion has passed himself off as an Uighur merchant from Kashgar several times before. Your task will be to render them any assistance they might need - in short, to be expendable.

"If the mission succeeds and the Hakim pledges allegiance to the King-Emperor, we will have halted the Russian juggernaut in its tracks - St Petersburg will not dare openly challenge England, its ally in Europe, for control of the passes to Afghanistan. Moreover, you will have won yourself redemption, and will be allowed to return to the card-tables of Quetta to fritter away your life in vulgar debauchery."

"Thank you sir, there is nothing I could wish for more. You can count on me. But may I ask one question?", I interposed. The Governor nodded his assent. "The way I see it is this. The alliance with Russia is all wrong. Look, Ivan may becoming over all soft in Europe, but the battle for world domination is being played out here, in the Afghan Cockpit. The Germans have no objection, as I see it, to our dominion over Asia, as long as we let them establish beach-towel hegemony over the Frogs and Wops. If we let them have their way across the Channel, they will have no reason not to help us give the Russkies the damn good hidin' they deserve on the Oxus and Jaxartes.

"Siberia will then be ours, an ideal dumping ground for all the socialists, liberals, Jews and book-reading types as are ruinin' our country. Our joint Germanic axis can then turn its attention to winning back the North American colonies and bringing civilisation to the benighted Africans and Latin Americans. European history took a wrong turning when it abandoned feudalism, and it's up to us Saxons to put matters right by sharing the benefits of slavery, corporal punishment and extensive ground-nut plantations with the lesser breeds.

"Champion and I shall take big guns, plenty of whisky and some Lilly Langtree phonogram recordings to the Hakim fellow, let him keep this Abdulawallah chap as a gesture of goodwill, then move the Baluchi Lancers up to the Pamirs, cable the Kaiser and tell him to get his Hussars cracking against Ivan. Yer see, the Krauts have this Von Schlieffen Plan, and it really can't fail, because..."

"Captain Deakin!", shrieked the Governor. "You will keep your political fantasies to yourself or I'll have you shot for treason! Do as Capt. Champion says, keep your tackle in your trousers, maintain some semblance of sobriety and maybe -just maybe - I'll let you return to your regiment. Is that clear? Good.

"Now, report to the Kashmiri Rifles at four o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Champion and Abdul Khalik will be waiting for you, and you can set off before morning prayers. Get your batman to assemble mountain kit for you tonight, retire early, and don't let me hear from you again until you return with your party intact and the Hakim's pledge of loyalty in your pocket. Now go!"

"So you agree to my plan, Sir!" I exclaimed in delight. The Governor clasped his head in his hands once again, no doubt overwhelmed by my brilliant strategic vision and the honour History would accord him for his role as my mentor in this undertaking.

"Listen, Peter," he said quietly. "You go and have an early night, and report to the Kashmiris as I said. Send my your batman, and I'll explain everything to him, alright?"

"Jawohl, Herr Gouverneur!" I assented with a knowing click of my heels, and moved to leave the State Room.

"One moment, Deakin," he beckoned. "Just tell me this before you go: how did you ever obtain a commission in the first place?"

"Perfectly simple, Sir; I inherited if orf my brother Bill."

"Bill, Bill Deakin? You surely don't mean William Wilberforce D'Arcy Deakin, the most brilliant graduate from Sandhurst in his year? Really? My son was there, too. Says your brother was a most promising officer."

"Oh, yes, Bill. Bit of an off-ox, actually. Wouldn't let Pater buy him a commission. Insisted on going through Sandhurst on merit, and then volunteered for the Engineers, fer Chrissakes. Wasted his spare time writing some damn-fool book- "The Army of the Future" or something, about how cavalry and infantry must be replaced by high-mobility mechanised divisions, or else the next war will be bogged down in murderous trench-warfare that will sacrifice an entire generation of the Flower of Europe, one by one. Well, I ask you! Thought bright-red uniforms were a bad idea, too. Stuff and nonsense!"

"What happened to him?" asked the Governor.

"Well, he decided to get himself married. Not to a decent shires brood-mare, either, but to some Oxford blue-stocking. Went on their honeymoon to look at wall-paintings in churches in Italy, if yer please. Wouldn't have a stag-night in the mess either, - her idea, no doubt - so me and the chaps slipped some stiff ones in his cocoa the night before and left him with a tupp'ny whore in Whitechapel - old Uncle Jack's stamping-ground, yer know. The least we could do.

"Anyway, damnedest thing happened. He came back from Eytieland blind, started raving about being the Duke of Wellington, went paralysed from the neck down, lost his nose, and died. Bit of a nancy-boy, really, but a shame all the same. Mater was quite cut-up about it, actually; too grief-stricken to speak to me for five years.

"Anyway, our loss was the Army's gain. Pater pulled a few strings and I got the commission."

The Governor was silent for a while. "You mean your father paid good money to get you into the Fifth Baluchi Lancers?"

"Well, er, no, actually. I was meant to join the Welsh Guards- fifteen guineas and a season-ticket to Twickenham for the CO, apparently - but my attempts to console Bill's widow were horribly misinterpreted, and the Lancers was where I ended up. Still, they're a good bunch and they do a damn important job."

"Yes, I suppose the Empire needs men to keep those vicious Baluchi nomad-pastoralists under control, or else they might sack Delhi with their dreaded, sharp-fanged flocks of sheep and fearsome walking-sticks."

"Quite, Sir. Their womenfolk are a force to be reckoned with, too," I agreed ruefully, recalling the number of narrow escapes we'd had from their wet towels and heavy undergarments during our Washing-Day bayonet-charges on the village bath-houses.

"Off you go, Deakin, and don't come back until I've been transferred somewhere else," said the Governor with a straight face. Quite a wag, really, I thought.

The Thought

L. P. Hartley wrote one of the best horror stories ever, "Podolo". Another gruesome effort was "The Thought", in which a man was driven to repent by nagging guilt - only to find something much worse. Both can be found in his collection "The Travelling Grave", if at all.

I once used the power of whimsy to banish an unpleasant image from Mrs Boyo's mind. I was happy to do so, as I had suggested the nightmare in the first place. The fantasy of a kingdom ruled by rabbits in the High Pamirs proved so saccharine that Mrs B was unable to recall anything saltier for days.

If only I had someone like myself to drive out my own djinns. Rather like tickling yourself or auto-fellatio, it just doesn't work.

In my student days, I joined Black Country yogi Ward Cooper in proselytising on behalf of synthpop, which we were sure would soon replace poetry, opera and conversation as the basis of human civilisation.

During one bout of evangelising I explained to Irish Pete the depth and intensity of Blancmange lyrics.

"What are these waves
They're coming over me
It must be my destiny"



sang the Surprised-Looking One Who Didn't Look Like Vince Clarke (the Hardest-Working Man in SynthPop. The Hardest Working-Man in the genre was without doubt Dave Gahan Out Of Depeche Mode).

"What the Surprised-Looking One is trying to tell us here, Irish Pete, is that he is drowning and there's nothing he can do about it. Very Zen" I ventured, passing the wild-eared Jack Shepherd impersonator another digestive.

He stuffed the biscuit in his Bundeswehr surplus lederhosen and proposed another reading.

"Yer man's a dwarf or elf or some shite, and he's working in one of them gay whorehouses in Amsterdam. There's a circle of Swedish sailors round him, and they're whacking out five-months of backed-up spud water over the feller. So as there's buckets of the stuff. Feck all he can do about it, mind."

With that he he waved a Thin Lizzy tape at me and left.

So now, whenever I hear the keening of a Moog, trip over a person of restricted arseitude, venture near the Gothenburg docks, or go to Ireland, I can't banish the image of a man dressed as Punch (for some reason) getting a Scandinavian man shower.

I've tried thinking of Kylie, mine enemies vanquished by Gorgons, Bono and Sting before a firing squad, all to no avail.

Any suggestions?

Cahiers du Cinema III: Village of The Damned

A film called "The Midwich Cukoos" is only going to attract Bill Oddie and trainspotters in their weird, sellotape-spectacled version of rehab.

So the not-at-all-spooky-sounding Wolf Rilla was right to rename his reverential cinematic version of John Wyndham's "Help! Our kid's a alien!" novel "Village of the Damned" in order to pull in the Hammer House of Horror crowd, despite what Mrs Boyo rightly noted as its dearth of Mediaeval eschatology.

I showed the film to Mrs B the other night, partly to aid her research into my hinterland ("There's a whole monograph there," she says) and as a cautionary tale about letting our daughter Arianrhod spend so much time talking to bees.

Mrs Boyo seemed to agree with my view that the central thesis of the film ("Blondes are not to be trusted") had held up well over the intervening 48 years. I was pleased that it had retained its pace and tension, revealed much about the dynamics of 1950s village life in England, and included the Greatest Living Dai-aspora Welshmen Peter "Grouty" Vaughan as "fainting deferential policemen No.1".

It was only while discussing Grouty's powerful performance with motor-muddle celebrity blogger Scaryduck over a vat of pig lager that the main plot flaw in the film occured to me.

Silken suave gentleman scholar and poignantly punctual suicide George Sanders concentrates on the image of a brick wall, so that the telepathic pre-teens cannot read his mind and see he's planted a bomb in their midst.

A masterly sequence in the film shows their short-trousered mental efforts to blast the image away, brick by brick, until they reveal the bomb - too late.

In my Fostered epiphany, I realised that Sanders was tragically too old and genteel to recall his own pre-adolescent state. Otherwise he would have ditched his brick wall in favour of the one image guaranteed to distract his charges - Big Knockers.

It's true. If he'd thought of a pair of giant love jugs, the kids would have been transfixed. The boys would have thought "Mmmm, big ones", thereby setting their mental coordinates for the next 60 years.
The girls would have thought "So that's it. Sod deportment, cooking and bridge, if I want one of these apemen to do my bidding all I need is some hankies until Eva Herzigová invents the Wonderbra."

The whelps would have still been pondering the mysteries of the mammary as George's sturdy, English bomb blew their pointy heads to all corners of Watford. He could have sauntered out of the school and celebrated by making normal babies with Barbara Shelley.

And, who knows, the real Sanders might have decided not to leave us in that Catalonian hotel room in 1972, but rather to live on and stop John Carpenter's remake.

And all for want of a D-cup.

Going Off My Rocker in a Knocking Shop

Spain was created, it seems, in order to convince me that Jung and Sting were both right when they cracked on about synchronicity.

Apart my Orwellian nightbus nightmare, there was the strange case of the Chueca hotel.

The best job I ever had was helping Belorussian ballerinas with their non-professional needs on a shambolic tour of Britain in 1990. I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to continue my duties during their Madrid season in 1991, free of charge. I even bought my own airline ticket. Frankly, I'd have crawled there with Roy "Chubby" Brown chained to my nuts if need be.

As always I left travel arrangements to the last minute, and so boarded an Aerolineas Argentinas flying trolleybus at sometime near midnight with what looked like a convention of people who took their dogs with them to "no questions asked" country guest houses.

I won't detail the bizarre manner in which the airline wanted paying, as I suspect there's a squad of men in black from the International Atomic Energy Agency still engaged exclusively on unravelling that one.

My best efforts at Spanish earned me a bus ride to central Madrid before my fellow-passengers had even recovered their collars and leashes. I found a public phone and called Basque Artist IV who had kindly offered me lodgings during my stay.

Basque Artist IV was a stubbled lush whose name began and ended with "X". This had struck me as a good basis for friendship at a party in London some months earlier. "When you come to Madrid you stay with me, Xardox the Fourth Artist!" he rasped through a cloud of cachaça and Ducados, propped up by his modishly-Scottish girlfriend and Basque Artists I-III.

He scrawled a phone number on a fag packet. I got him to sign it in case he achieved Hockneyed fame or I forgot the order of consonants and ended up lost, alone and sober on the midnight streets of Madrid.

Which is of course exactly what happened.

His phone hadn't answered for days. I assumed he was painting a mural in, or possibly on, Bilbao and would be back any day. He wasn't. For all I know he was some sort of happening dreamt up by Basque Artists I-III in a moment of Situationist ennui. Perhaps they had all been members of the Federation of Conservative Students making some sort of over-subtle point about minority cultures. I just don't know.

The hours passed in gloomy contemplation of Franco's architectural legacy, enlivened by a dousing from the maniacs who hose the streets in the two-hour gap that allows the crowds of happy drunks to get home, shower and arrive at their bank/parade ground/air-traffic control tower in time for work.

The most welcome sign in the world is a large, plastic doner kebab outside a Pinner takeaway near where I first stayed in London. "In this sign shall ye conquer" it says to me. But for a moment a scrappy neon "Hotel" in a cramped Madrid backstreet nudged it into the salad bowl of oblivion.

I spilled into the lobby, and had an exchange in elementary Spanish with the oily clerk at reception that went like this (to my understanding):

Boyo: Good morning, sir, do you have a room free?

Clerk: A room?

Boyo. Please. For just one night. I am tired, but have money.

Clerk: Certainly. For one night?

Boyo: Please.

Clerk: OK. Random number of pesetas. Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Ta.

I spent a grateful few hours in the knackersack of Lethe, then called the partner of a friend due in Madrid that day in the hope he could put me up. He called me back soon after, and I checked out and moved into his pension round the corner.

It was owned by a couple who'd discovered that their modish support for the Republican cause did not go down well with General Franco's otherwise commendably multicultural Moroccan Regulares. They spent several grateful decades in France, and so I was able to explain in French my luck in finding such an accommodating establishment but relief at moving into their more distinguished rooms.

"That was not a hotel, but a maison d'assignation," explained our worldly host.

And so, on reflection, my exchange with the reception clerk probably went like this:

Boyo: Good God, Cavalry, do you have an open camera?

Clerk: You want a room?

Boyo. Colour me up. For just one night. I have a uniform and doublets.

Clerk: Whatever floats your Armada, son. You want the whole night on your own?

Boyo: Would you care to join me?

Clerk: I'm ok here. Random number of pesetas. Conchita is in Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Hail Mary.

The receptionist at a Madrid brothel was confronted in the middle of a dry and balmy night by a friendly yet sodden Englishman (how was he to know?), bearing a suitcase of Mediaeval jerkins and expressing no interest in the specialist staff. He handled it well, as I'm sure he did during every Conservative Future outing to Spain.

Many years later, I wandered past a work colleague engrossed in the Rough Guide to Madrid. We fell to talking, and I asked him where he was staying in that fine city.

"A boutique hotel in Chueca, the former red-light district. It used to be a brothel, akchooly," he honked fruitily, pointing at the address and description in the book.

As Bryan Ferry once remarked, you can guess the rest.