Midnight matinee part two

You can sing along with this scene...

Midnight matinee part one

Monte Carlo (1930)...

The mirror crack'd

Standing in the Co-op, buying a People's Friend and a tin of pineapple chunks, I'm bemused by the conversation behind me. A girl and two lads, all in dark "first accountancy suits." They were talking about the gossip mags on the rack, all boasting pictures of Abby Clancy, who is Nursing Heartache over Peter Crouch's Infidelity. Or as we used to call it: footballer's girlfriend pissed off at his dicking about.

"I mean," said the girl, "if you had a girlfriend like that would you go an sleep with a prostitute?"

"I dunno," said one of the lads, "she looks a bit ropey in that picture."

"She's upset, she's not going to be looking her best."

"Well, I dunno..."

I looked at him. He looked like a badly-filled hot water bottle.

Sunday singalong

Come along now, you all know the words!

Probably not really trying

There should be more to a mid-life crisis than a pot of tea...

Operation Errol Flynn

When my grandfather was pinned down by sniper fire in a banana grove in Burma I wonder if he ever imagined I'd be sat here watching a train called "The Spirit of Osaka" taking Chinese white goods to what used to be the Empire's largest industrial park.

Biting the hand that feeds you

I don't mind the squirrel taking all the hazelnuts from the top of the bush before they're fully ripe. After all, I can't reach them so they may as well be doing somebody some good.

I do object to the furry hooligan barking at me for twenty minutes while I'm in the garden.

Nuts in August

It's not so bad.

After an interesting day at the office and a long drag of a commute it's nice to find the back garden filled with lilies and then while away a good half hour pigging out on green hazelnuts picked fresh from the tree.

Dating

As a last-minute nod to the weekend necessities of the domestic hearth I've just cleared out shelves two and three of the fridge. I had decided that there was no room in my life for anything with a "best by" date of 19 Sep 99.

I suppose I'd best sort out the little drawer in the bedroom next...

Let's parler franglais

I've long since stopped trying to fathom out how, or if, my mind works. For whatever reason, I was reminded of this hoary old chestnut on the bus home tonight. I expect it was told by Stainless Steven or someone of that vintage, back when the menfolk in their audience had a smattering of French after their participation in the first unpleasantness...

The lady two doors down has been taking French lessons and she's getting to be a bit of a bore about it. She keeps dropping phrases into her everyday conversation to show off a bit. Anyway she got her comeuppance the other day. She'd written a note to the coalman saying:

"Voulez-vouz donnez-moi un ton de nutty slack."

So he wrote her a note back.

"Certainments, madame, do you want it a la carte or cul de sac?"

Drizzly

It would be churlish to complain about the noise from the children's party down the road, so I won't.

I've pigged out on blackberries and apricots and strong Cheddar cheese laden with blackcurrant ketchup. Green tea with rose petals. A young Annie Lennox bopping away with the Tourists.

My life may be a hollow shambles but it's comfortably accessorised.

Pop idol

I remember my sister's first Radio One Annual. It was the year after the Summer Of Love.

There were feature articles on Joe "Mister Piano" Henderson, Bob Monkhouse and Ken Dodd.

On the plus side there were photos of Judy Driscoll and Nancy Sinatra that I can still dredge up from what remains of my memory at the blink of an eye.

Thermidor

The entrance to the station was decorated by a line of plastic flowers, a dead frog and a home-made notice depicting a photograph of a tortoise with the caption

LOST

Answers to the name MM

If found please ring...

The platform was dotted with bumblebees intoxicated on privet blossom and littered with the remains of many moths.

Mother Nature had had a bad morning.

Heroes and villains

The mark of a good hero, they say, is the quality of his villains. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I'll grant you that the mark of a good villain is often the quality of his hero but I think the reverse is a largely modern phenomenon. There doesn't have to be a single mirror point of antagonism for the heroic ideal to be displayed against. More often than not, in both legend and literature, quantity not quality is the measure of the hero.

The rise of the arch-enemy is largely a post-Great War thing, amplified and simplified after the Second World War. In times of massive change and widespread uncertainty there is a primal need for simple explanations for conflict and the war against Hitler, and the horrors that came to light, could be presented as a straightforward fight against a single, coherent evil, whatever the messy realities. Ever since then, Western culture has sought to satisfy the same craving, whether in its politics, films or literature. And when no good-enough villains defined good-enough heroes we created and celebrated anti-heroes to fill the void.

But what of Holmes and Moriarty? They were Victorian, weren't they?

Indeed they were. How often does Moriarty actually appear in the works of Conan Doyle? Really? You'd be surprised if you didn't already know (and if you don't already know you'll just have to go and read them, won't you?) Professor Moriarty was created as the villain who would kill Sherlock Holmes; he was the author's instrument of murder. Conan Doyle, being no fool, knew that it would be beneath both author and character for Holmes to be bashed on the head by a passing cut-purse. Holmes could only be credibly destroyed by a creature of equal stature. And so it came to pass. When Conan Doyle finally, reluctantly, resurrected Holmes he did not also bring Moriarty back to life as well. He had served his purpose and would only be an infrequent back-reference in future stories. Only in later incarnations did the hero require the recurring villain.

In these modern times it seems more rational to pit man against man or monster than to have him battle unreasoning fate. Which doesn't mean it's right.

The evil of banality

The parade of human history is littered with the faces of people who have done horrible things. Accompanied, as always, by the songs of the Greek Chorus; "he was so ordinary..." "you'd never have thought to look at him..." "he was a model neighbour..." Unremarkable people do remarkable things and they may be for evil as easily as for good. Perhaps more easily: "you'd never have thought to look at him..." could cover a multitude of sins. When they are brought to justice, by court or by history, even the worst of them turn out to be ordinary human beings. Crumpled, grey and empty. Even the most charismatic of them are rendered mute by the camera's eye, entirely missing that vital spark that sometimes only the photograph will reveal. The emptinesses of their existence drives them mad and makes them think they are God. And if God's existence can mean so little, why would the lives of lesser mortals pass mention? And so, unremarkable people do remarkable things. The grey bureaucrats of Kafka and Orwell strike terror and the parlours and morning rooms of genteel England are littered with the corpses of the stabbed and poisoned.

But we love our bit of terror.

Those sensationalist shocks and those lashings of the Grand Guignol. Those delightful moments of terror that give us our adrenalin rush safe from accompanying danger. We like our demons dressed up in the costumes of pantomime, our villains bedecked in hi-vis personae. We can hiss and boo with childish delight because it is safe to do so. We are the magpies chafing a passing cat: we know the danger and we know we are outside its reach.

But every so often...

The baying crowd gathered at the execution of the latest monster.

"Have your moment!" cried the monster. "Have your thrill! You cannot kill me! I am you!"