Anti-Danube: Chapter IX

In which Agent Kafka and I differ on popular culture

"Slezynka plunged deep down the orphanage well
To smother her shame wrought by Szekler lords fell.
But "crack!" went her bones on a rocky outcrop -
The Szeklers had stolen the water as well.

"Poor Slezynka knew that to stifle her sob
And drown out her heart like a leper boy's bell
She would weep booming tears that droplet by drop
Filled the well and her lungs from bottom to top."

The audience at Zhakhiv Cultural Agitational Facility No.17 in the Name of Bragg was struck dumb and, in a few happy cases, deaf, by "Szkeklers Shamed Slezynka", the latest in a long series of poems about violated orphans of the monarchy era read by the author herself, Symona "Shmonka" Cheshetsya - Deputy Minister of Peasantry and retired People's Popular Folk Bard (1952).

Agent Kafka and I applauded as freely as our NAKRO-issued civilian suits allowed. These garments came in two sizes - too large and too small - and were fashioned from the clothes cut off the pulped bodies of CIA infiltrators at the Comrade Samantha Smith Memorial Execution Ground and Timber Mill.

As no bourgeois spy ring had bothered with Ruthenia since the notorious Yankee Incursion of 1947, this left the Ruthenokex State Textile and Haberdashery Trust with a small selection of brown shorts, green arms patches and a whistle (minus nutritious pea) from which to kit us out.

According to the History of the Workers' Democratic and (United) Socialist Party of Ruthenia (Medium Course), CIA agents masquarading as a group of so-called Hungarian Boy Scouts had crossed the border in 1947 using the cover of an invitation from the Ruthenian Scouting Association.

They were immediately intercepted by a detail of the Internal Retentive Border Coordination Guards. Their private possessions were redistributed along collectivist principles among various individual commanders, and the alleged scouts themselves were given the fraternal opportunity to dance with Bodjo the Largely-Tamed Bear - a gift from the Moldavian Socialist League for Animal Cruelty - while the Guards put on a reciprocal display of virtuoso slyvovytz drinking.

The Guards then retired to consume a festive meal of mamalygha and papanasz, leaving Bodjo to forage for himself among the Scouts.

Provocative questions from the wholly-compromised Hungarian "government" led to an urgent NAKRO investigation of the incident. This concluded that the Border Guards had acted correctly in disarming the insurgent unit of "American-trained paramilitary dwarves", and rewarded Bodjo with the title of Progressive Woodland Ranger, a peasant ration book (grade IX) and several conjugal visits to the infirmary at Political Prison No.49 in Szeumas-on-Myłn - at least once at an inmate's request.

NAKRO later arranged a visit for the leaders of the Ruthenian Scouting Association to the scene of the incident, where the Internal Retentive Border Coordination Guards and Ranger Bodjo were happy to re-enact the events of that day with them.

For Kafka and myself, this meant that the clothes allowed me to raise my right hand to an almost horizontal position, while Kafka struck his with knee-length lapels.

We squinted at full attention as the crowd shuffled in the pews and pulpits of what had once been The Cathedral of The Interrupted Ascencion, and prepared for the main event of the evening - the Battle of the Bands.

Socialist Ruthenia had fought a stern rearguard action against the advance of music throughout the postwar period, prompted by Comrade General Secretary Yütz's displeasure at a performance of Symphony No 5 in G# Minor ("The Bastard") by People's Popular Composer Uzz Kalnis.

Massed timpani had hammered out the Morse Code for "Starve The Comprador Latifundistas!" a few metres from the General Secretary's box, while a chorus of Fishwives for Peace chanted "Fist Up, Fist Up, Comrade Yütz!" during the 20-minute ondes Martenot improvisation in the scherzone.

The Central Committee's decision was swift. Kalnis was called up for a "lap of honour" second stint of military service, this time in the 8th Experimental Submarine Parachute-Launching Brigade, despite his advanced years and inability to breath underwater.

The new principles were cascaded more broadly across the portfolio of the Ministry of Applied Culture. All music had to accord with the 1949 Yütz Theses:

• It must accord with the Will of the People, as expressed through the mood of the General Secretary.
• It must be played on instruments whittled, ground or stolen by workers, peasants and ill-nourished soldiers, and at a distance of not less than one county from all members present and future of the Præsidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Acting Organs of the Workers' Democratic and (United) Socialist Party of Ruthenia.
  
• It must not exceed five minutes in length (considerable debate followed as to whether this referred to individual pieces of music or all music composed in the People's Democratic and Popular Republic. Much of this debate was conducted in prison).
• All public performances in the capital must feature young Gypsy women in bodices a size too small.

For 30 years music in Ruthenia consisted of crones tapping out Lehár waltzes on sacks of flour as gravy-streaked college girls jumped up and down in oily lingerie liberated from ex-Queen Sylja's bath house.

Then came Beatlemania, and the country was flooded with six reels-to-reel of songs by what turned out to be The Scaffold. By 1981, the authorities felt they had to intervene - especially as Lily the Pink was taken to be an attack on Comrade First (General-)Secretary Novak's wife Liljljanja and her allegedly Polish tendencies.

The Ministry of Cultural Reassignation therefore empowered itself to create two singing ensembles in order to stem the "rising tide of subjective melody and crypto-Francoist rhythm" ("Sotsjalystychna Muzsyqa", editorial, 4 March 1983).

These two "bands", as they came to be known ,were recruited by the People's Self-Defence Army Penal Battalion from a group of conscripts found trying to mount an accordion in the backyard of a distillery. They were joined by four prostitutes and a drummer who, on medical examination, proved to be a barbary ape donated to Zhakhiv Zoo by the government of Algeria.

The ape was shaved carefully and emerged as the leading songwriter of Kava Break, the marginally faster of the two groups. The other band, Izotop, played up to its fondly-imagined "bad boy" image with single-entendre song-titles like "(Swing From) My Girder Of Love" and "(Politically-Engaged Miners) Slide Down My Shaft".

They alternated as winners of the annual Battle of the Bands, filmed live and shown five months later by Ruthenian State Television on lignite-powered sets in many interrogation centres of the less mountainous parts of the republic's maritime territory.

This pattern was briefly interrupted in 1987, when the Party decided to show solidarity with the Progressive Palestinian People by adding the category "Least Zionist Ensemble" to the competition criteria. That year's winners, Izotop, pointed out that this objectively made Kava Break the Most Zionist band in the country and therefore liable for re-education and confiscation of their possessions.

NAKRO and at least two other security organs, one of them subsequently believed to be Izotop dressed in Bulgarian marching-band uniforms, turned up, turned over and turned in Kava Break. They got 15 years hard labour: five for lack of Semitic awareness, five for not understanding the charges, and five for each year they had failed to reveal their Zionism.
The ape got off with a suspended sentence after convincing the judges that he was a member of Neturei Karta. He then joined Izotop, making it Ruthenia's first super-group.

Izotop enjoyed its three-year run as default winner before successfully petitioning the Supreme Higher Party Council of Organs (Verxvysszstrankradorh) to pardon Kava Break on the condition that the freed musicians should undertake Izotop's solidarity tour of South Yemen.

Izotop generously relinquished the ape as well - rumour had it because lead singer Lev Basar resented his sidelocks and college-girl following.

Kava Break scored a commanding musical and ideological comeback with the ape's drum-led single "Golda Meir Stole My House" [translator's note: the song later enjoyed a copyright-free afterlife as a remixed trance track on the Tel Aviv dance scene.]

Now, the two bands mounted the stage to compete once again for Ruthenia's highest popular music award - the continued waiver of their military service. In keeping with the the Party's drive to economise on power, time and individualism, both bands performed their latest hits simultaneously and on the same instruments.

This policy was dubbed "Creative Lamarckism" and promoted the adaptation of a citizen's limbs to the eventual ideal of Socialist multitasking in gunfire, forgery and the seduction of West German Embassy clerks.

As the bands tussled over their dulcimers, Kafka nodded towards the bar as vigorously as his crumbling garments would permit. We crabbed our way through the throng, with Kafka rather undermining our cover by brandishing his Laika pistol and NAKRO club card at anyone who stood between him and 500 grammes of slyvovytz.

"What do you think of this competitive element in popular music, Agent Kafka?" I inquired as he crunched the cap off another bottle with his eye socket. "I mean, surely it's an inherently capitalist approach to what ought to be a collaborative effort?"

He downed the spirits thoughtfully, pausing to belch a blue flame of satisfaction around his Karbin filtertip, and said: "I void myself on them, on their music, on the nuns that bore them, and on the Slovak who comforts the pig that sired them. And then on that pig, too. But most of all, Zhatko, I crack open my codpiece and..."

His words were drowned by the bitonal, overamplified version of the banned royalist anthem "Hey Ruteni, masluy mi sztifli!" (O Ruthenians, Oil My Boots!") being blasted out of the sound system. Kava Break and Izotop gestured in vain that they were not playing their lyres, hornpipes and gamelans as the local militia and music-lovers seized the opportunity and backing vocalists and stormed over the footlights, truncheons and skinning belts aloft.

Banners strung across the stage proclaimed that all concerned would Put The Resolutions of the XIIIth Congress of the Workers' Democratic and (United) Socialist Party of Ruthenia Into Life. They suddenly fizzed and sparked into life, leaving behind the stench of sulphur and these letters stencilled into the proscenium - ZHIJE NAXAJLO! - Naxajlo Lives!

"He focked us," Kafka concluded. Not for the first time, Agent Kafka was understating the matter. As gouts of slyvovytz-scented khaki ichor erupted from our every accessible orifice, we turned to the barman. He was gone.

The Protocols of the Elders of Capel Seion

University types and Guardian commentators have, with typical bourgeois boorishness, robbed the stevedore and Thuringian infantryman of their sole remaining pleasure - anti-Semitism.

Whereas they were once damned for running department stores and undermining the Ludendorff Offensive, Jews are now accused of controlling the British Liberal Democratic Party and their own country, not to mention the world.

Nonsense, of course. A Jewish world would be neater, better-fed and more musical than this lot, although there's only a certain amount of Diet Coke one can take.

Middle class extremists are obsessed with political influence. They skip over the boring stuff Marx wrote about the economy and go straight to Lenin's cut-out-and-keep guide to taking over useless countries. All they think they need is a newspaper and the willingness to get up early in the morning.

It is all the more surprising, then, that they've failed to condemn the one nation that has spent a millennium systematically wrecking political parties. I speak of us Welsh, and here is the charge sheet.

1. The British Liberal Party. In 1906 the Liberals all but wiped out the Tories, leaving the latter in the hands of porcelain pansy Arthur Balfour and Canadian mute Bonar Law with only Ulstermen for comfort. The Liberals invented pensions, built Dreadnoughts and bullied their betters in the House of Lords. They led us in defence of gallant Belgium. Their leader was a Classicist.

Then they dropped Asquith in favour of David Lloyd George, who strapped the Liberals onto the scabby flanks of the Conservative Party and spurred his gullible colleagues on into electoral oblivion.

The Liberals showed some signs of revival during the Second World War under their Scottish leader Archibald Sinclair, but Montgomery's Clement Davies took over just to time to drag them back to six MPs representing escaped convicts on exposed moors.

Another Scot, Jo Grimond, began their rehabilitation, and the Liberals perked up considerably under the vulpine dandy Jeremy Thorpe - and who wouldn't? But the leader was lost when he found himself accused alongside a pair of Welsh businessmen, John Le Mesurier and George Deakin, of conspiracy to murder.

The plucky Libs rallied again to the Braveheart banner of Scotsman David Steel (can you see the pattern here, people?), only to have it dragged through the bog-snorkelling ditch of despond by Taffmesiter Dr David "Llywellyn" Owen and his Alliance of Evil.

The Liberal Democrats have not been doing badly of late, but that's largely because we've transferred our Silurian attentions to the major parties. Watch out for adopted Welsh Lembit Öpik, though. He's bidding to be President of the party, and owes us one after the way he treated the lovely Siân Lloyd.

2. The Conservative Party. This has been a tougher nut to crack. The Tories are often called the Stupid Party by people who win far fewer elections than they do, but if there's one thing a Tory can spot it's a Welsh in his midst.

For this reason we have had to use guile. Selwyn Lloyd did what he could to wreck both the Eden and Macmillan governments from within, but Supermac gave him the Supersack in 1962. In revenge we activated Mandy Rice-Davies, and the Profumo Affair pretty much did for the Tories.

We can't claim credit for the shark-toothed disaster that was Edward Heath, and dropped the ball badly over Mrs Thatcher. It took over ten years to get her in our triangulation of fire from North West Clwyd MP Sir Anthony Meyer, Portalbot baronet Sir Geoffrey Howe and Welsh Guardsman Michael Heseltine.

Since then we've found the odd easy lob - Ffion Hague, Michael Howard - has kept the Tories hors de combat. Once again, however, we face a Scottish challenger in the form of Young Cameron, and are working fast to get Monmouthshire MP and prize buffoon David "Top Cat" Davies into a position where he can cause real damage.

3. The Labour Party. Long insulated by its thick layer of Scots, Labour suffered few direct hits in its early decades:

• It got over Aberavon MP Ramsay MacDonald.
• Colonial Secretary Jimmy Thomas failed to detonate until well after the 1929-1931 Labour Government had fallen.
• Aneurin Bevan backfired on us too.

Indeed, it wasn't until the 1980s that we got into our stride against Labour. Sacrificing the pawn of a Welsh parliament in the 1979 referendum was a stunning start to a campaign that involved planting Ebbw Vale MP Michael Foot and Neil "Bloody" Kinnock as party leaders in succession. Labour's subsequent loss of the 1992 election to Kaspar Hauser impersonator John Major remains our finest hour.

Labour under neo-Scotsman Tony Blair proved impervious to our efforts. He identified and neutralised our sleeper, Prestatyn-born John Prescott, early on, and took the premature explosion of Martyr Ron Davies in his stride.

As for Gordon Brown, we're genuinely baffled. Our best genealogists have found no Welsh blood in his ancestry. For the time being we're happy to leave him to it, while we concentrate on:

4. Plaid Cymru. That's right. Not since the doomed Social Democratic Party (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Welsh-in-law Shirley Williams, anyone?) has any political group been so farshtopt mit Walizers.

Spoilt for choice, we've unleashed some of our finest saboteurs on our own national party. Dafydd Elis Thomas, Ieuan Wyn Jones and Helen Mary Jones should be enough to teach party chairmen the Lloyd George Rule - They've Got Three Names: You're Out of the Game.

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Evelyn Waugh once wrote "We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales". And England is still making lots of history for us to trample over with our loping, lupine tread.

Bear in mind too that "Waugh" as a surname is cognate with "Welsh". Do I have to draw you a map?

I danced with the Tsar

Fellow-sufferers Gyppo Byard and Gadjo Dilo have recounted the horrors that mothers-in-law can always surprise you with, and I'm sure they have far more in store. I will recall the first meeting with my own mother-in-law, Bela, at a later date. Here I present the true story of Mikhas', quondam editor of Belarus magazine.

I spent a delightful couple of years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union shuttling between London and Minsk in a quest to make money out of Belarus. "Guid tank country" was my Caledonian colleague "Shuggy" MacLeod's laconic account of that country, a radioactive swamp dotted with dazed peasants who bumble about in ill-fitting clothes and gas-fuelled buses waiting for the Russians to come back and make them miss the Poles all over again.

I frittered away the funds of my then employers while enjoying the company of ballerinas, models, artists and war veterans. Among the many random people whose homes I cuckooed in at uncertain hours of the evening was Mikhas'.

Soviet-era Belarus was as much of an enigma wrapped up in a waste of time as it is now. My then boss still gasps at the Belarusian Tourism Board's plan to market not their own malarial parade-ground but rather 1980s Cambodia as a holiday destination, with flights via Minsk's impenetrable airport. "Sun, sea and genocide?!?" he had yelled at the officials as I translated. "So, but perhaps not the last element," responded a turtle-faced berry-picker in a cardboard suit.

One evening we had dinner at home with Mikhas'. His wife Lyuda was an official interpreter, and between them they made up the entire Belarusian pro-Gorbachev camp. Most other intellectuals did nothing to counter one historian's remark that the entire Belarusian national movement in 1920 could have fitted on one modest sofa. The only change since that was that the latest generation of patriots could barely stay upright on any item of furniture for long enough to make their point.

Mikhas' edited Belarus, a magazine doomed from the start by being published in Belarusian - the cheeriest but least-spoken tongue in the whole country. It's difficult not to love a language that calls the railways "chyhunka", birds "ptushki" and your good lady wife a "zhonka".

The magazine was twice cursed by trying to promote the Third Way of Soviet reform in a country that either liked being kicked in the head while being lectured about The (Second) Great Patriotic War or else wanted to be an independent mini-Poland and top of the European Rickets League.

Mikhas' had just come back from a conference in Moscow, during which he had been received at the Kremlin by President Gorbachev himself. The Heir to Lenin was clearly a micro-manager, as he had found time to assure Mikhas' that his 60 unread monthly pages of articles about bison grass and how all the famous Poles were really just shy Belarusians was the key to promoting prudent financial management, local democracy and general sobriety on the western borders of the Unbreakable Union of Free Republics.

Our host was recounting this to our general bemusement when his mother-in-law walked in. She had been ferrying bowls of cabbage from the stove for half-an-hour with the eerie glide that old ladies perfect. Mikhas' decided she ought not to miss out on his good news, and declared "Did you hear that, Mama? I met the president yesterday!"

"That's very nice, Misha," she replied, bearing a tureen of spent offal back into the kitchen. "But then I danced with the Tsar."

We spent a good 10 minutes watching Mikhas's crest fall before the good lady rejoined us with a tray of traditional gunpowder nuts and turpentine schapps. She sat down and told us the story.

"I was a debutante in Mogilev in 1916, and we were all excited that the Tsar was coming to our New Year Ball. His military train had been based nearby for much of the War. He arrived, as promised, and I nearly fainted when he cut in and asked me to dance. I remember that his eyes were pale blue, watery and kind, and his beard smelled very strongly of tobacco. " He said nothing. At the end of the dance he bowed with a smile, and walked off."

Into history. Within weeks the February Revolution had cost Tsar Nicholas his throne, and in little over a year he and his family were murdered by their Bolshevik captors.

Mikhas's mother-in-law had kept her genteel origins quiet, and somehow survived civil war, Stalin, starvation and Hitler. Mikhas' may have felt upstaged, but her readiness to tell the story that evening was a tribute to the efforts that he and other Gorbachevians had made to let some light into the dank cellar of Soviet society.

And, like all mothers-in-law, she had the last word.

Actes et Paroles

Hardly anyone in Britain learns a foreign language these days apart from us glorious Welsh, and all we learn is English.

There are dialectically objective reasons for this:

• All the foreign types your average Englishman meets either speak English or are eager to learn - Club 18-30/Saga/timeshare reps, Brazilian pre-opp transsexuals, Spanish policemen, Greek scam artists, Romanian au pairs/aspirant second wives, Polish barmaids, amusing gîte owners, Amsterdam dominatrices: they all speak commercial English.

• The main foreign language on offer in British schools is French, which is almost unpronounceable and spoken by unsavoury sorts - recalcitrant gîte owners, Belgian paedophiles, the Tontons Macoutes, advanced film-makers and the French.

• The only other languages on offer are either even harder (German and Russian), spoken by sinister thugs (German and Russian again) or just primary-school French with a dash of back vowels (Spanish and Italian).
  
  
• British people who already speak a foreign language are pretty suspect - teachers, bankers, North Londoners with children called Inigo and Suki at the hotel table next to you, theatrical types, terrorists and the late Edward Heath.

And that school trip to Normandy, on which contact with fag-dangling t-shirted French teens left your female classmates with a distingué disdain for sherbet, Star Trek and tank-tops, is still too painful to mention.

Rash Papist Tony Blair tried to change this by introducing yet more French, this time at tot level, but could find no teachers willing to sit in a roomful of infants going "ronrone".

English liberals, with their connoisseur's eye for the next big tyranny, seek out schools ("private, but what are we expected to do?") or at least nannies that offer Chinese. Conservatives shore fragments against our ruins.

They trouble themselves for naught. I'm a border-hopping polyglot who's bathed in the penicillin of cross-cultural congress on several continents, at least one of which I discovered by myself. As such I can cite testimony to the effect that a gentleman traveller needs no more than three phrases to get by in any given language.

My neighbour in Tashkent was a retired KGB officer who had moved into property development - mainly that of political prisoners, from what I could see. Over arack and Bulgarian cigarettes one evening I asked him how to go about learning his native Uzbek - a tricky tongue that 18th century Turkish nomads developed to help speed purloined Persians through their eunuch training courses.

"Throw away your text books, son," he drawled. "This is all you need - indeed, all you can get away with - in the knife-happy defile that is Uzbek society. When you meet someone, say 'assalamu aleikum' before they do. They'll like that. When they ask you how you are - 'yaxshimisiz?' - say 'juda yaxshi, rahmat' - very well, thank you'. They may ask how your family is - 'uydaghilar tinchmi?' - they are also 'juda yaxshi' whether they exist or not as far as we are concerned. 'Man Angliadan' - 'I am from England' - will clear up any other conversation. Attempts at asking Uzbeks anything else could get you thrown from a minaret in a sack full of cats. Cheers!"

He was right. I spent three years as the lion of the pilau-circuit due to my wondrous ability to say my spectral wife and kids were from England and doing ok, thanks.

At the time I recalled that my fellow-student in Soviet Moscow, "Tubby" Roberts, had got through an entire year of perestroika mania with the following Cockney-accented phrases:

• Privet - hello.
  
• Yeshcho raz - same again.
  
• Izvini, ya ochen zanyat. Zakhodi poslezavtra - Sorry, I'm very busy. Drop round day after tomorrow.

No social chemistry with Russians is so complicated that it cannot be handled with these simple formulae. A meeting with President Yeltsin would have gone swimmingly with the first two phrases. A meeting with President Putin could have been avoided with the third, for at least a while.

Since this epiphany I have collected language manuals published in the British Empire prior to 1947, and found that they are all based on this principle.

A valuable resource is the back catalogue of Mssrs Routledge & Kegan Paul. Its current language series is a dreary sheaf of shopping inquiries and verb tables, but once it gloried in such works as "Colloquial Arabic" by De Lacy O'Leary, in which donkey-wrangling plays a major part.

Other classics in the series include Elwell-Sutton's guide to buying a beer in Esfahan and addressing the Crown Prince of Persia, and a book on Hungarian by Ugric loon Arthur H Whitney that dealt largely with cheating army officers at the card table. Excellent.

The pride of my collection is "The Modern Pushtu Instructor" (1938), which taught Army of India officers how to supervise the Pathans as they went about their business of molesting unbelievers and kidnapping the wives of Peshawari barbers. It illustrated the regular conjugation with the verb "to beat". I find introductions to Afghans are always eased by my sole phrase - "Hindu halakano wahalay day" ("The boys beat the Hindu").

Experience suggests that some parts of the world need only one or two words, repeated firmly, to make a Briton feel at home. "Yalla, yalla!" will do in the Near East, "Bas, bacche" produces striking results for Inner Asia, and "jiggy jiggy" gets you a hotel room from Bangkok to Mindanao.

The key is to seek out likeminded people. Dads make themselves understood wherever they go, and Guardian-readers can source a salad in the most carnivorous of climes.

Among souls with a deep spiritual bond, words are simply superfluous. As I recently related to MC Ward, a friend was once hired to interpret for a group of Kyrgyz policemen. The Home Office had invited them to Britain to learn the ways of civilised law-enforcement, and decided that the force best equippped to do the job was the West Midlands Police.

My friend had little to do, as the coppers found their common interest in kicking witnesses downstairs then shoving their heads into toilet bowls broke through the language barrier - that and so much more.

And now, if you'll excuse me, ya ochen zanyat. Zakhodi poslezavtra.

The Body Politic

Everyone's leading the life of the mind these days. Our little shelf of the bloggery is laden with fancy types listing their favourite operas, concert works, fillums and gay singing festivals.

This is something, up with which I shall not put. As The Daily Mash has so rightly pointed out, the Inter Net was not designed for august musings but rather for downloading wrap music, one-handed perusals of Salma Hayek's modelling portfolio, and speculating about the plans of International Jewry to take over the Liberal Democrats.

I have therefore decided to devote today's blog post to lady politicians whom I would like to shtup.

1. Sarah Palin (see above)

Oh yes. A cracker in every sense of the word. She may be a Creationist, but I could persuade her of the merits of the Big Bang. One day Alaska!

2. Yuliya Tymoshenko

Ukraine's occasional prime minister is a Carpathian confection of breasts and buttocks held together by rapunzel hair and a total lack of political sense. Mucky as a Belorussian swamp, Pani Yuliya is the one blonde I'd happily get in the (Cos)sack.

3. HM Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands

Orange, Hot and Dutch, Queen B still does it for me. Her ready access to helicopters full of cash, primo drugs and canals of XXX porn more than compensates for her advanced years. And her ability to speak Dutch suggests that her tongue is still as nimble as a Filipina go-go dancer.

4. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

On the subject of the Philippines, was any president ever more appropriately named? Tagalog is also the best language in the world for talking dirty. It's a mixture of whorehouse Spanish, suggestive grunts and lewd gestures. She's a Catholic, and so might have a nun's habit to dress up in or even her own Spanish-Inquisition-themed dungeon. Excellent.

5. The Right Hon Theresa May MP

I have had the pleasure of being trodden on by Ms May. I was taking a nap on the floor of a recording studio one night shift when La Theresa turned up for an unscheduled interview and stepped on my head. She was very sorry. I insisted that, from my perspective, she had nothing to apologise about at all.

6. Angela Merkel

Dump, frumpy and grumpy perhaps, but the Bundeskanzlerin could easily pass for Theresa May if you've been relaxing at the Munich Beer Festival for a few days and feel lonely.

7. Tzipi Livni

Her name means White Bird, if my Hebrew serves me well, and she definitely sets my dovecote astir. With her sullen glare, post-coital hairdo and imminent ability to deploy the Israeli Defence Force wherever she like, this is one Tzipora I would certainly like-a more-a.

8. The late Ulrike Meinhof

I don't want to dig up the Divine Ulrike or anything like that, but merely seek to correct any perceived right-wing bias on my part. It's not Socialism's fault that it attracts badly-dressed shrills, as George Orwell once pointed out.

Finom ez a krumpli?

"Is your potato tasty?" That is the first sentence I learned in Hungarian, courtesy of Andy Wislen. He had spent time in Budapest learning the Magyar skills of breakfast drinking, preposition misplacement and border confusion.

I put it to good use in the Soviet Union, when the snack bar of Hostel No.3 In The Name of Pavlik Morozov at Voronezh State University In The Name of The Man Who Invented Beetroot was invaded one morning by 13 lascivious, chain-swearing Hungarian girls. Three of these deposited themselves and a selection of stale peppers at the table next to myself and my room-mate, "The Rev" David James.

We knew enough of their cut-and-shunt language to grasp that they were sizing up our respective merits as bed-fellows, and frankly neither of us was too pleased with the verdicts - accompanied as they were by wilting gestures and the Danube equivalent of retard noises.

We wrought our vengeance by casually leaning over on depature and muttering our two choice phrases - The Rev's being "Calvinista vagyok" (answers on a postcard of Esztergom Cathedral nave, please).

We ten Brits were the only West European men at the university, apart from a Portuguese Communist and a dipso French teacher called Adolphe. Chosing to be a Bolshevik was considered a sign of sick humour or soaring stupidity by beneficiaries of the Warsaw Pact, and M. le professeur's name won him no friends out there, so the Hungarian gals soon decided that we were the best they were going to get - whether we liked or not.

We did.

This equipped me with a skeletal grammar and x-rated vocabulary of the Hunnish tongue, plus a great respect for the stamina and sheer depravity of that moustache-wrangling nation.

My next encounter with a Hungarian came while working for a consultancy company in Oxford. János was our Budapest rep, and had the charm one associates with the man about Pest - with his German jacket, elegantly receding hair and chess-player's brow. As the say, he could enter a revolving door behind you and emerge ahead of you.

He also had a terrifying wife called Ildikó - a peroxide collision between Courtney Love and Sarah Palin in an overcrowded wonderbra, with an appetite for riding boots and carmine lipstick. I rather liked her.

János came over to a conference in Oxford one year. I introduced him to my young lady, who also happened to work with us. While I was bullshitting expertly about Bulgarian bonds to some Tarquin de Coke type from Daterape Merchant Bank, I noticed János take missy aside for a chat.

I later asked her what it was about, in the most casual manner possible.

"Quite funny, actually," she simpered. "János and his wife are going to dinner with Burlington Arcade III this evening, but Ildikó has left her tights in their hotel and won't have time to fetch them.

"She asked János to pick some up for her from the shops, as she's in meetings all morning. Being a typical man, he doesn't know the difference between tights and stockings and didn't want to get it wrong, so he asked me to explain.

"He still didn't get it, so in the end I just showed him my stockings. I think that did the trick."

What is a Hungarian? A Hungarian is a man who can get a young woman he has just met to show him her garters in a crowded office, a few feet from where her partner is sitting.

What I never had the heart to tell her was that János's wife hadn't come on the trip.

Gesamtkunstberk

Gyppo Byard snatched an Oxford degree from the butter-stained fingers of a punt-bound Classicist, and has since supplemented his career as a heather merchant with some musical freelancing. He smacks a dismantled, unlicensed Austin A30 with badger bones and passes it off as a gamelan to the credulous secondary schools of Berkshire.

In order to confirm his status as Twyford's top troubadour, Gyppo has listed his 12 favourite operas and challenged the rest of the world to do the same.

My view of opera is similar to that of Kaiser-i-Hind George V, who told Sir Thomas Beecham that he liked La Traviata best as it was the shortest he could think of. His Imperial Majesty also thought "people as write books otter be shot", an understandable sentiment given that his reign spanned the careers of Galsworthy and Virginia Woolf.

So, if you can't sing it in a couple of acts, preferably in a wig and/or Polari, then you need to go back to composer school or whatever.

Having said that, I have more than a passing fondness for chunks of the most meandering atonal nonsense ever to stagger around a stage in predictably daring costumes.

I have some common ground with Gyppo apart from the clods of earth he frees from my lawn in an attempt to establish a Rrom Rrepublic by land reclamation. I too like Philip Glass's Akhnaten.

It fits the bill of being at least partly sung in a foreign language - in this case the Victorian gentleman scholar's impression of what Middle Egyptian might have sounded like. It is also quite short if you play it without repeating the arpeggios and ostinati - about 20 minutes in total.

Here's my favourite bit, performed by clay rodents:

I'm partial to the slabs of Wagner that involve little or no singing. The overtures, preludes and ballet sequences to his operas are genuinely musical, and help you forget the Lara Croft stuff about dragons and bosomy ladies. The prelude to Tristan and Isolde, the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser and the Ride of the Valkyries bring back happy memories:

• Tristan is based a Welsh story of ambling around damp castles in search of someone with a candle and some shoes;


• Venusberg is a mercifully short novel by Welsh toff Anthony Powell, written before he wasted his life on a Dance to the Music of Time; and


• The Valkyries recall a night of drunken misbehaviour with a secretary from Turku in a Russell Square hotel. She shared her duty-free with me - an act of stunning sacrifice for a Finn.

Here's some Tristan:

Alban Berg's Wozzeck is short and has an excellent aria "Eia Popeia", which I sing to lull our daughter Arianrhod to sleep as she roosts gently above the hearth. It also has a series of long sustained notes that impressed Benjamin Britten, which is odd given his fondness for tunes.

Berg attended a performance of Wozzeck in Leningrad in the pre-Stalin days when Soviet music included factory whistles and choirs of alarmed county gals in workers' smocks. He spent most of his time there in fear of assassination - possibly by the armed wing of the musicians' union whose members had to play it.

Here's the lullaby sung by Merav Barnea:

Berg went one better with Lulu. Let's face it, I was going to like anything named after my favourite russet Scottish songbird. It's long but unfinished, so I cherish the thought that Alban would have cut it down to about an hour if he hadn't died of toothache on Christmas Day in an act of excessive pathos.

Lulu has everything an opera ought to have - lesbians, stockings and top hats - including Jack the Ripper. Here's Saucy Jack, cleaning the streets:

"Peter Pears

Need put on no airs

He's had them written

By Benjamin Britten.

So fuck off, Tippet!"

That's what our claque of opera thugs used to chant at premieres of Sir Michael Tippet's latest sack of clomping, brass-laden whimsy, and we weren't wrong. Britten unravelled a skein of tenor roles just for our Pete, but I find them reedy. It's only now that they are getting adequately butched up by other singers.

The English tweedy sense of the absurd is uneasy with opera, and Britten was the first to write stage works that weren't Celtic or hilarious - intentionally or otherwise. The Turn of the Screw is an eerie chamber work, with a libretto by exquisite, Welsh Myfanwy Piper that draws out themes from the story with malign delicacy. It also has a mercifully small tenor role.

Here's Miles's queasy aria "Malo" from a fine film version (with Dutch subtitles for the Flemings among you):

Sweet dreams.

Where Was You?

A fruitful meme via Normblog and Harry's Place, asking where we all were as history lifted the duvet and slobbered on our toes:

Princess Diana’s death - 31st August 1997

Having a bath in my flat in Tashkent, waiting for the car to take me to the airport for the flight home for my brother's wedding. It was coming up to eight o'clock in the morning, local time. Some royal correspondent was reminiscing fondly about the Princess on the BBC World Service, and I thought "What's the silly mare done now?" Then came the headlines. Our driver Nusrat had already heard the news, and assured me that MI5 had done it.

At the wedding reception six days later the DJ played Candle in the Wind. The family of my English sister-in-law sat in respectful silence. Our Welsh family continued chatting, drinking and smoking. It wasn't Di's big day, was it? A week later I was back in Tashkent, walking down a street at dusk with a British colleague. She mentioned that Mother Teresa had died the same day, and recounted the "Sandals in the Bin" gag. Our laughter was cut short as a nun of Mother Teresa's order crossed our path.

Margaret Thatcher’s Resignation - 22nd November 1990

I was working for a consultancy company in Oxford, attending our morning editorial meeting. The Reuters wire went beserk, and a don at the table said "she's gone". Everyone was quietly delighted. We got on with our work, but no one came back from the pub after lunch and the management didn't expect us to.

Attack on the Twin Towers - 11 September 2001

I was the desk editor in the newsroom of a respected broadcaster, and happened to have CNN on the screen above me. I saw the first plane hit as the channel switched coverage to the Twin Towers, and called my colleagues over. I thought it was a nut in a private plane, or an awful accident. As everyone went to sit down again I saw the second plane disappear behind the first tower. At this I blithely told my deputy I was taking my lunch break.

Down the bar at least one colleague was insisting it must be US rightwingers, while I thought it was Bin Laden. And I heard the first sick joke about the attacks, though I can't remember it. A professional highpoint that I'm unlikely ever to equal.

England’s World Cup Semi-Final against Germany - 4 July 1990

I can't remember clearly, which was pretty much my state for the whole of the World Cup. I watched almost all the games in other people's houses in Brighton and North London for some reason. For this one I think I was round at the flat of prog-rock pimpernel Ward Cooper in Golders Green. I felt very sorry for Pearce.

President Kennedy’s Assassination - 22 November 1963

This is an odd one. My friend Wislen was visiting my hometown of Dolgellau, and we bumped into my cousin Iola in a pub. When Wislen told her he was from Dallas, he got the usual "Oooh, I remember where I was when that poor President Kennedy was shot". She was listening to the radio while giving the infant No Good Boyo a bath in the kitchen sink during one of my parents periodic cavorts among the speakeasies of Llwyngwril. This surprised me, as my mam says I was born in December 1964. Hmmm.

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.