The Amazing Adventures of Clunk: a postmodern superhero story

Back in 2002, in the early days of the wideworldinterweb, when people still paid attention to Friends Reunited and other cave paintings, someone did something cruel, evil, and funny.  Some unknown person (or at least unknown to me, though they are presumably known to themselves) from my old school, or perhaps two or more people working together, although the literary style suggests a single writer, appropriated the identities of several (10) Lutterworth High School and Grammar School* old boys and girls and made entries on Friends Reunited in their names (*it was and is actually a Comprehensive school, but continued to go by the name of Grammar School, even after the medieval era.  Mind you, though, if you think that’s bullshit, it’s now called Lutterworth College).  Anyway, as I navigated around the Lutterworth-schools sections of the re-acquaintance-themed netsite, I noticed that the interconnections between the unlikely entries told a dark and exciting tale of alien invasion, conspiracy, murder, incarceration, escape, and robots.  The entries and the tale they told came from the differing individual points of view of the stolen identities who were the purported writers.  The clues that allowed readers to link from one to another were mentions of names in one entry which tempted you to log on to the named person and see what their entry said.  Sure enough, it would contain a continuation or another version of the story.  Total brilliance.  In the meantime, it had a bit of fun with the characters concerned, whether they were the supposed writers or others named in the story—usually old Lutterworth High School teachers of the 1976-79 era, l’epoch Clunk.  

After a while, the entries got reported and taken down.  Luckily for humankind, however, I cut and pasted them into a Word document, so they have survived for posterity.  Well, actually, I’ve since lost the e-document, but I recently rediscovered a hard copy, which today I scanned and copied into this blog post for your amusement.  Obviously, the said reproduction is going to be of greatest interest, if it's of any interest at all, to those who went to school in Lutterworth in the seventies and very early eighties.  But the way the story is constructed and the medium through which it was told may also interest others who are interested in that sort of thing.  (I apologise, btw, for the pretty shitty quality of the reproduction, but there you go.) 

The supposed lead story-teller and hero of the whole scenario is David Clarke, or Clark, or Clunk--as he was always known.  The nickname, Clunk, which to the best of my recollection he carried throughout his school years from the age of 5 to 16, was a perpetual and pithily hilarious reminder that he suffered from severe learning difficulties.  Incidentally, and this is the point at which I digress, I remember that one social-economic indicator that every schoolboy and girl back then recognised was the number of arms a kid had on his or her glasses.  If he or she always had two arms, both of which were always in perfect repair, then he or she clearly came from at least a solvent family, and perhaps even a family that was quite well off.  If they always had two, but with one of them sometimes attached with, say, a sticking plaster or band-aid, then they were from a poorer family but one with capable, make-do-and-mend kind of parents.  If they went around for periods of time with just one arm to help their nose in its job of supporting their spectacles, however, then their parents were obviously poor and relatively un-resourceful in other respects as well.  The longer the periods spent with one-armed glasses, the poorer and less resourceful the family was likely to be.  Now, where is this leading, you may well be asking?  Well, the thing is, in my recollection, Clunk, whose parents were, alas, very poor and un-resourceful on account of their own obviously severe learning difficulties, usually came to school with one arm on his glasses.  Except for one day, when he came to school with no arms on his glasses.  To cope with the fact that the second arm had become detached and had presumably somehow got lost, one of Clunk’s parents had, in an attempt at resourcefulness that was so desperate that it was in its own special way valiant and admirable, attached his glasses to his face with an elastic band going around the back of his head.  The effect--that is, the tension stretching the skin on Clunk's face and the consequent contortion of Clunk's eyes--most likely impaired Clunk’s vision even more than his original genetic defect, so someone was probably doing him a favour in assembly when they placed their finger beneath the elastic band and then quickly lifted it, sending the glasses and band flipping spectacularly through the assembly hall air for a good 20 metres and maybe more.  Poor Clunk. 

Anyway, the others in the story.  Reggie Lightbrown was called Goony on account of the fact that he was both mentally and physically goonish, goonoid, and indeed goony.  Ian Holcroft was called Scabby because he had eczema.  And Shane Richards was called Honey Monster because he looked exactly like the Honey Monster in the Sugar Puffs adverts back in the seventies.  We were not witty, as such, we were quite literal, and we were cruel, but we were funny.  Or so it seemed to us at the time.  The other “writers” had no particular nicknames, but their idiosyncrasies are vividly displayed in the characterisations given to them here by the actual writer.  The other non-authorial characters featured in the narrative include Clunk’s older brother, Charley, who had considerably greater learning difficulties than even Clunk, and never went to normal school, but could often be seen sadly lumbering around Lutterworth with little more physical agility or mental awareness than a bovine that had escaped from its farm and found itself confused and terrified by the people and the cars and the noise of the town.  Charley Clarke was picked up and dropped off at our school each day on his way to and from his special-needs school, a passenger on what we routinely referred to as "The Spag Chariot".  I remember an English teacher going absolutely batshit at us when he heard us calling it that, though I can't remember his name, though I can remember knowing he was right but my friends and I carrying on like that anyway.  The other non-authorial characters are teachers from 1970s Lutterworth High School.  Mr Greenhalgh was indeed a terrifying and mentally unstable deputy head with a penchant for grabbing children by the tie and half-throttling them if he deemed the knots of their neckwear to be excessively large.  Mr Seal was indeed an inadequate and consequently sadistic PE teacher, if you’ll excuse the redundancies in this sentence.  And Mr Elliott, a music teacher, did indeed, I now realise after reading this story, resemble a robot. 

As you will no doubt already have noticed, the people in this story or these stories are people who stood out: hated teachers and weird kids.  People who, frankly, bring out the worst in most of us: sometimes these weird kids suffered, as many of the rest of us were often cruel to these people.  I am not proud and I have no excuses that will save me from eternal fire if such eternal torment actually exists, but I would like to say that if I had been 45 when I was 5 and 46 when I as 16 I would definitely have behaved differently.  One thing I will say is that some of the teachers were little better than us children back then.  I still remember Mr Bailey taking the register and calling one kid “Jathon Watth”.  Because Jason Watts had a lisp, see, see, fnnrwaahaa?  Thththththththth—hahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa.  A fucking teacher, for Christ’s sake.  I remember well enough that I was not immune myself from the mockery of teachers and peers.  During one of the more corpulent stages of my childhood, for example, Mrs Knapp called me a “fat slob” in a geography lesson, and for no particular reason that I can recall. I remember also being called “Elephant” and greeted with such salutations as, in the local accent, “SARS! You big, fat fookoh!”  Sadly, none of that taught me to be any more considerate of the feelings of others, or not at the time anyway.  For example, the person who nicknamed me “Elephant” I nicknamed “Pipes” because he was skinny, like a pipe-cleaner.  Fortunately, I believe things are rather better in schools these days.  Or at least the teachers are made to behave better, even if there’s not much you can do about the kids.

So why am I reproducing this and putting it out into the world on my blog?  Well, perhaps it’s not justifiable. In fact, it really probably isn’t.  But I’d say this: the protagonists are highly unlikely to see it, and if they do then it was all a long time ago by now.  I don’t think it’s particularly nasty, anyway.  Indeed, Clunk actually comes of it rather well.  Here, he’s obviously intelligent and literate, which one must suppose he kept a secret at school.  He is a bit paranoid and rather irresponsible with regards to firearms, and yet he’s fundamentally decent, heroic, and kind of a Fox Mulder figure.  Besides all that, some old friends from time to time over the last nine years have mentioned that they too saw this story on Friends Reunited, and in turn I’ve mentioned that I believed I had a copy somewhere and would let them see it again if I found it.  And it was a cleverly inventive and therefore interesting use of what was then a new medium of communication.  And it’s pretty funny.  If you don’t think any of what’s below or above is funny, then fair enough, I admire you, you are a saint, and I apologise.  But I bet you did.  Go on, admit it.  You knew you shouldn’t, but you did.  Go on.  Admit it. You did. Yes you did.       

If anyone knows who the real author of all this was, by the way, do tell.

Britain *ALREADY HAS* a Bill of Rights! (Yes, apparently, it really is necessary to shout.)

BBC Radio 4 is a radio station that considers itself informed and informative, a bastion of the Reithian educational mission of Auntie Beeb.  It is indeed a radio station on which regulars varying from pompous Today Show host John Humphreys to the snobbish and far-less-left-wing-than-he-thinks-he-is though admittedly clever and funny comedian Armando Iannucci regularly heap implied and explicit scorn on those they suppose to be less educated and less intelligent than themselves—i.e. everyone else.  Yet this morning some of those on the station proved themselves (not for the first time by any means) to be staggeringly ignorant, at least by the standards which they believe they meet and everyone else does not.  This morning they revealed, obviously accidentally, that they do not know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  I shall explain the circumstances of this revelation in a second or two, and a second or two after that I shall explain the Bill of Rights itself for those who wish or need to know about it, but first let me make clear where I’m coming from here.  You may suspect that I am being just as contemptuously arrogant here as the people I’m accusing of contemptuous arrogance.  But the reason I’d say I’m not is this.  I’m not contemptuous of those I suppose to be less educated and/or intelligent than me.  Nor am I contemptuous about those who I know are more educated and/or intelligent than me but who happen not to know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  But I am contemptuous of the kind of people who are contemptuous of those they suppose to be less educated and intelligent (no and/or for these people) than themselves but who in fact don’t even know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights.   

Right, I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. 

So, anyway, this morning, just after the 7.30 news, or maybe just before, it’s not on iPlayer yet and, anyway, who cares?, the surely-not-coincidentally named Michael Buerk (all he needs is a definite article for a middle name and the picture is complete) was previewing The Moral Maze, a discussion programme that he chairs.  As The Moral Maze aims to discuss the ethical issues behind the week’s news stories and therefore tries to be relevant, “The” Buerk’s preview was prefaced by a distinctly pro-May-sounding account of Home Secretary Theresa May’s dubious and indeed much disputed claim that under the Human Rights Act, a European law adopted by Britain in 1998, and which some Tories want us to unadopt, an otherwise apparently illegal immigrant was allowed to stay in Britain because he has a cat.  “The” Buerk has form for retrograde palpable nonsense, claiming in 2005 for example that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” has gone too far and that men are now just “sperm donors”, so I’m quite comfortable making these claims about “The” Buerk’s views on immigrants, the law, and cats, however much they are actually based on groggy early morning half-listening.  What I did hear clearly, though, was the next bit.  It was about history, so the brain woke instantly and the ears perked up.  What The Buerk (screw the quote marks, they’re not necessary) suggested next, as the premise of tonight’s show’s discussion, was that perhaps instead of relying on European laws and conventions, Britain should adopt its “own Bill of Rights....”  Obviously not realizing that, as I say, Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  This was bad enough, this already had my blood boiling, and with my hypertension issues that is not a good thing, but what he followed that up with made it even worse.  What he followed up that up with was “.... perhaps based on that of the United States.”  Rrrrgggrrrggghhhrrraaaggghhh!!!

Those of you who are historians, or at least historians of the modern (ish) world, will know precisely why I go Rrrrgggrrrggghhhrrraaaggghhh!!!  You will know that it is because, as I say, Britain already has a Bill of Rights.  And far from being based on the American Bill of Rights, the American Bill of Rights (1791) is partly based on the British Bill of Rights (1689, actually originally technically the English Bill of Rights, as it was passed before the 1707 Act of Union that abolished the Scottish Parliament and incorporated Scotland into an English-British state).  Now, once again, let me be clear, I have no contempt for those of you who are not historians and do not know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights, or that it helped inspire the American one.  I do not even contemptuously suppose that you are less educated and/or intelligent than me just because I know something in my area of expertise that is not in yours and you therefore don’t.  Perhaps you’re highly educated and/or highly intelligent, but have been misinformed by those who contemptuously suppose themselves to be more educated and intelligent than you are.  That said, if you do reflexively think yourself as being more educated and intelligent than everyone else, and yet don’t know that Britain already has a Bill of Rights, and that it influenced the American one, then I think you are indeed a Buerk.  By the way, if any of you are thinking that it’s our fault, historians’ fault, that you don’t know Britain already has a Bill of Rights—that we sit in Ivory Towers staring up our own bottoms instead of communicating our knowledge to others—then I can tell you the whole Bill of Rights thing has been explained by Simon Schama, David Starkey, and many others in numerous radio and TV programmes and perfectly readable best-selling spin-off books.  If you haven’t heard or seen the numerous radio and TV programmes or read the perfectly readable best-selling spin-off books, that’s fair enough.  But don’t blame us.

Anyway, in that spirit, briefly, here’s the thing.  James, Duke of York came to the throne as King James II at the death of his brother, Charles II, in 1685.  Even before then, “Whigs” had opposed James being crowned because he was suspected of believing in the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy, and because he was a Catholic, though many thought the religion was not unrelated to the politics.  His actions in his reign seemed to confirm these fears, and, after a son was born in the summer of 1688, offering the prospect of a whole new dynasty of tyrannical Catholic Stuart kings, leading parliamentarians decided to act.  They invited William of Orange, the arch-enemy of absolutist King Louis XIV of France, the European champion of Protestantism, and the husband of Mary, James’s daughter, to invade Britain and sort James out.  William landed at Torbay on 5 November, James went to meet and resist the new would-be William the Conqueror, but then bottled it and legged it, leaving the country by Christmas-time.  After that Parliament reformed as a Convention, declared that James had abdicated the throne, and declared William III and Mary II King and Queen.  The Convention also passed a Declaration of Rights that listed the misdeeds of James, set out specific limits on monarchical power, and set out the basic political rights of the English (later British) Parliament and people.  The declaration was passed into law by Parliament as a Bill of Rights on 16 December 1689.  So there you go: the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 and the Bill of Rights of 1689.

Below is a link to the English Bill of Rights from the Yale University Law School Avalon Project that digitizes “Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy”.  Below that is a link to the US Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, also from the Avalon Project.  The US Bill of Rights was adopted on 15 December 1791, 102 years minus one day after the English one.  Read the two and you'll see many similarities and that the latter was influenced by the former.   

Below all that is a link to a Sunday Times article from 2005 reporting on The Buerk attacking some studio newsreaders for being autocue-reading “lame brains”, and even attacking one of them for being a “complete dumbo”.  (The Buerk read the BBC One o’clock News from 1986 to 2003, the Nine o’clock News from 1988 to 2000, and the Ten o’clock News from 2000 to 2003.)  The Buerk reckons proper journalists ought to be able to write their own scripts, so we can assume he wrote the script for his preview of The Moral Maze.  In which he said that maybe Britain should have its own Bill of Rights, perhaps modeled on the American one.  The article shows that John Humphreys agrees, saying that newsreading requires “no brain”.  (John Humphreys read the BBC Nine o’clock News from 1981 to 1987.)  The Sunday Times then invites readers to send in their views on the question of whether newsreaders are “the voice of authority or highly trained, autocue-reading monkeys?”    

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp

                  

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rights1.asp

                       

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article530705.ece

Tony Blair: Regrets, I've had a few... or one anyway, and it's a shocker.

Some time late last week Tony Blair was on the radio for some reason that I cannot now remember.  I’ve tried to find the interview on the Today Programme’s schedules on its website, but I can’t.  The only thing I can think of is that it was perhaps an old recording of Blair dating to the publication of his “memoirs” almost exactly a year ago.  (I’m putting “memoirs” in inverted commas here, by the way, specifically for Tony Blair.  Of course, all human memories are imperfect, all are interpretative, selective, or inaccurate in some way and to some degree or another, but I like to think that most people are basically honest and doing their best, however imperfectly, to remember things as they really were.  I assume therefore that most people, if they write their recollections about their lives or careers, write memoirs.  As for Tony Blair, however: he has never to my knowledge knowingly spoken the truth about anything in his entire life, unless it happened to coincide with his interests and designs, and seems capable only of constructing or in this sense reconstructing reality only inasmuch as it suits him or his ends in some way or another, so I am calling Tony Bliar’s memoirs “memoirs”.)  Anyway, I digress, and I apologise for the absence of the aforementioned contextual details, but they are really not that important anyway.  And I apologise if this is basically a year behind the times, although I’m sure many would agree that it never hurts to remind ourselves of the mendacity of Blair.  So, anyway, whether Tony Blair said it (again) last week or whether last week I was reminded of what he said a year ago, what’s important is what Tony Blair said and what Tony Blair said was this: the thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  Let me repeat that.  The thing that he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting. 

I repeated that because it is impossible, utterly impossible, for a normal, decent human being to assimilate the moral implications of these words in merely one reading.  Those implications are simply too immense and too appalling to take in without reading them at least twice.  It is also impossible for any normal, decent human being to comprehend the fullness of their implications straight away.  When I heard those words, I had to repeat them, albeit perhaps in paraphrase, back to myself a number of times, and I had to spend a considerable period thinking about them, in an attempt, perhaps as yet futile, quite possibly ultimately futile, to think my way all the way around their moral enormities.  I knew right away there was something terribly wrong going on, but it took a long time to take in the fullness of the wrongness.  So, before going any further with this post (if you’re still reading it, then you have obviously not yet abandoned it in exasperation at ever knowing what my point is, though I would not have blamed you for having done so), but, as I say, before going any further, abandon your screen, make a nice cup of tea, or coffee if you’re a foreign Johnnie, and think through as far as you can, short of causing yourself mental injury, obvs, what Tony Blair said: that the thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  The thing he regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  Right, go on, off you go. 

Back?  Good.  Right, I’m going to say it one more time: the thing Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is the ban on foxhunting.  That is to say, he does not regret the most, or indeed at all, as he has several times insisted, the wanton error of believing in Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction just because he soooooooo wanted to believe in them and have a war in Iraq and show the President of the United States his bum.  Just the other day the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller (yay, some relevance), revealed yet more evidence that Blair followed instinct on Iraq to the extent of defying evidence—as we all know well enough already—and as none of Blair’s self justifications will ever make us un-know.  Nor indeed does he regret the most that this act of staggering incompetence and irresponsibility has led to hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths, deaths of human beings, human deaths, hundreds of thousands of them, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of other people who have been physically and psychologically wounded.  Nor the fact that this deadly goose-chase distracted from the business of holding to account those who actually were responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, which was really where all this began.  No regret that the Iraq war allowed Osama bin Laden to live nearly a decade after committing mass murder, that the Taliban are still running riot in Afghanistan, that there are Muslims all around the world, including within Britain, who are motivated (however wrongly) to murder their fellow citizens because the Iraq attack made them feel that it was actually an attack on them.  No, not these things; not these things, no.  What Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs.  Yes, what Tony Blair regrets the most about his premiership is saving foxes from being hunted with dogs.

I find it surreal, almost unbelievable, that Tony Blair actually regrets that he has saved many thousands of animals from ritualised slaughter, from being hideously killed through the process of being torn to pieces by crazed dogs under the charge of even-more crazed men and women who chase these beautiful animals while tooting absurd horns and wearing ridiculous costumes.  He regrets that.  He regrets that!  That is something that he regrets!  Actually regrets.  And not only does he regret that, but he regrets it more than he regrets anything else in his premiership.  That is, he regrets saving these beautiful animals from dogs and cruel lunatics more than he regrets the hundreds and thousands of needless human deaths he directly and personally caused through his stupidity, rashness, and hubristic insistence that he was right about Saddam’s weapons and that all the experts were wrong.  If that is so, and it is so, however incredible it may be seem, then he is truly one of the most amoral men ever to have lived.  Not immoral as such.  Not evil.  But nevertheless a man completely blind to the significance of his actions, a man who is thus completely incapable of understanding the gravity of what he has done, of seeing the consequences of his actions in any sort of rational and indeed decent perspective.  It appears indeed that he is some kind of off-the-autism-scale moral unrelativist who can only judge the events he put into motion by a calculus of how it somehow affected him, rather than by the calculus of pain caused to others, as admittedly incalculable as that may be.  Sadly, therefore, it seems he is a man who will never be able truly to regret anything he has done, not in any recognisably sensible way.  So there is certainly no chance that whatever severely attenuated and probably in fact in his case non-existent part of his brain that we might call his “conscience” will be as tortured as it certainly ought to be by the truly terrible things he has done. 

Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.

6 May 2013 update.

So Niall Ferguson has recently got himself in trouble for some ill-considered remarks about how John Maynard Keynes was a poor economist because, being gay, he didn't have children and therefore didn't care about the future.  He has since apologised, a good gesture, but one that is somewhat undermined by the fact that, according to many, he has a lot of form for this supposedly out-of-character and spontaneous outburst.  Others have criticised his qualities as an economist, despite his abilities as a historian.  In this old post below I point out that at least on occasion he's also a very poor historian.... 

First, the recent story and his apology: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/04/niall-ferguson-apologises-gay-Keynes

Then, the old post (September 2011).

There’s obviously going to be a lot of guff as well as sensible stuff said about 9/11 in the course of this 10^th anniversary week of that hideous atrocity, but I doubt we’ll see anything more ludicrous than Niall Ferguson’s counterfactual on the day and its consequences, linked below, or, in counter-fact, of the day that didn’t happen and the consequences of that.  This bunch of insupportable assumptions dressed up as a logical and likely chain of events following from the fictional foiling of the 9/11 plot--which just happen to show that Bush-Blair invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were right and a Kerry presidency would have been a catastrophe--is so full of holes that it is in fact a hole.  And yet, even while concocting this far-fetched and yet simplistic series of supposedly inter-locking unlikelihoods, he has the nerve to talk about “historical process” and how “the world is a seriously complex place, and a small change to the web of events can have huge consequences.”  My guess is that Ferguson’s brain must be an irony-free zone, a torpid lump in fact of nothing other than humourless right-wing dogma.  But, above all, what's he ultimately saying?  That he's glad 9/11 happened?  That’s certainly the implication, whether he noticed that or not.  I suspect he didn't.

Dispiritingly, as with David Starkey (see previous post, if you want to), this kind of thing doesn't but should turn the media off him—and it would if only we lived a society that valued rational and intelligent discussion enough to refuse to tolerate a market-driven-mad media that prefers to make money than to make sense.  (Now there’s a counter-factual for you.)  But, in actual fact, because most of the media, the mainstream of it anyway, is indeed a market-driven, advertising-revenue-seeking monster, it is therefore a massive-twat-generator, serving up braying media whores like Starkey and Forge who, as they up their own antes, are prepared to disgorge ever-more outrageous and therefore attention-grabbing spew in order to do nothing more valuable than advance their personal fame and fortune. 

And it makes me quite angry, in case you didn’t notice. 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/what-if-9-11-had-never-happened.html

   

A review of a bottle-opener, or decapsuleur.

In the last post but one I was saying about how great it is to laugh at and be laughed at by foreigners.  And that reminded me of a bottle-opener that pokes fun at the British that I saw in a shop in France this summer. A bottle-opener, I have to say, of such crassness that I stood staring at it for several moments, transfixed in astonishment at the totality of horror before me. Then I took a photo of it, which I've since lost, but I found another picture of the dubious product that I have posted here for you to stare at in awe. Go on, take a look at it. A good, long look. Study it. Study it closely. Go on. Feel my pain. 

So there it is.  A bottle-opener, a decapsuleur, mounted on a plank of wood upon which is printed several icons humorously representing Britishness. Or not humorously, depending on your point of view, and your age, and intelligence. It’s harmless enough, to be sure, not offensive in anything except an aesthetic sense. It is clearly not xenophobic or nasty in that kind of way. If anything it seems to come from a nice place, a place where one has a little harmless guffaw and nothing more at the foibles of foreigners. I should also be clear at this point that, whatever I may say about this decrapsuleur, I am a huge fan of almost all things French. I’m presuming, by the way, having failed to observe the bottle-opener’s provenance when I stood in a kind of reverie before it, that it’s a French creation and made for a French market, as it has the word “Decapsuleur” written across the top. On the other hand, it might have been made by a British company for a French market, although it also looks like something that might well go on the wall of ex-pat bar for the burbling delectation of excessively sun-tanned beer-bellied Britons. Whatever the case, it either shows how some French people imagine Britain, or it shows how some Brits imagine the French imagine Britain. And as the manufacturer, whether French or British, wants to sell these things, and as the French shopkeepers who buy them wholesale want to sell them too, whether to the French or to the British, we can safely assume they’ve all done their homework and that this thing reflects an amusingly purchasable version of Britishness in the minds of whoever the potential customers are. Indeed, I’ve seen all the icons or things like them on souvenirs reflecting Britain before, and so they clearly sell. And yet the way some of them are rendered at least in this particular instance is, in my opinion, really quite astoundingly appalling, although I think it’s perhaps the combination of all the images together that renders this bottle-opener such a catastrophic failure of taste. Let’s take each part of the thing one-by-one on its own merits, or, in fact, demerits, and then conclude with some overall observations about the whole horrendous melange.

The Union Jack that covers the backdrop of the little plank is fine. Indeed Union flags, especially slightly weather-beaten-effect ones like this one, are everywhere at the moment, and seem to be very much the thing of the season in the world of soft furnishings, for example, especially cushions.  Then there are some references to lager and bitter, and this is where things start to get distressing.  Okay, I suppose we Brits are indeed famous for liking our beer, although so is pretty much everyone else in the European family, and yet, to be fair, more singularly perhaps, we Brits do indeed distinguish beer by the names of lager and bitter. But simply writing the words “LAGER” and “BITTER” seems a little unimaginative to say the least. Couldn’t they have printed a picture of a couple of bottles or something a bit more interesting? And so the same with “ENGLISH PUB”, also in capitals but in even larger letters underneath. I mean, what the fuck is that about? Whatever it is, it’s just not good enough. I would not have the effrontery for example to produce a French-inspired souvenir and be so lazy as just to write PARISIAN CAFE on it. That would just be such an absymal insult to people’s intelligence as to deserve violent retribuition. I need a break. 

Okay, back. Then, after “ENGLISH PUB”, we have a complete change of theme where it says “Lord Brian”.  Yes, “Lord Brian”, right after the beer and pub references. Where did he suddenly come from, whoever the hell he’s supposed to be? Okay, whatever, let’s try anyway to make some sort of sense of “Lord Brian”. Right, Britain has its aristocrats and its House of Lords, okay, yes, yes, and Brian is a funny name, with Pythonesque connotations, as in “Life of Brian”, which is certainly a quintessentially British thing. And I suppose that the combination of “Lord” and the slightly risible name of “Brian” amusingly evokes the kind of in-bred gormlessness that the British aristocracy do better than anyone else to the east of Appalachia. So “Lord Brian” does kind of make sense, although it still seems to me a bit weird and random. The small crown underneath is, admittedly, a bit of a better effort. It at least relates to “Lord Brian” and thereby restores some sense of thematic coherence that was lost somewhere after “LAGER”, “BITTER”, and “ENGLISH PUB”, royalty being at the head of the famous British class system so unimaginatively represented by “Lord Brian”. And at least it’s a picture, as if whichever one of the gang of goofballs who happened to be responsible for this little bit of the bottle-opener had a sudden attack of shame and decided the least he could do was insert a modicum of effort into his or her part of this egregious endeavour. Then there’s the Bulldog, with its head tilted slightly sideways, presumably for extra funniness. Again, though, at least it’s a picture, not just the word “BULLDOG” printed mindlessly and in shouty capitals across the middle of the plank. It's as ugly as hell, though, although that’s appropriate enough for a bulldog, so some marks for authenticity there.  Then, however, finally, we have it: the coup de merde. Under the dog, it says, almost, “God Save the Queen”, except—oh no!—it doesn't!—it actually says “Dog Save the Queen”! Haaaaa! See what they did there? Fnerrrk!  Dog—DOG—Save the Queen! Dog! God backwards, see? Dog-God! Under a picture of a dog! See?!  See?! Hahahahahaaarrrggghhhnnn....  

Okay, so, to conclude, some of the features of this bottle-opener are fine, others are at least explicable, but others still are an absolute disgrace in terms of either conceptualisation or realisation or both. But does that explain the fullness of the badness of this decapsuleur? No, I don’t think it does. I think the full measure of its evil is to be found in the combination of all the features together in one place, on one single hapless item, in the synergy of awfulness, in the perfect storm of tastelessness, and in the lazy randomness of the combination. “LAGER”, “BITTER” and “ENGLISH PUB” are related to each other. “Lord Brian” and the crown are related to each other. And these are at least a little bit related to the saving of the queen and the tragic, hapless dog. But there is still a terrible sense of a jumble. It’s as if someone has decided that one aspect of Britishness is not enough anymore, not a sufficient blow to the senses to make a satisfactory souvenir, and that in order to sell something as British-ish you have to pile up chaotic heaps of incoherent representation. Or else someone of no discernment, some sort of gurning imbecile undoubtedly, has gruntingly gorged on some random morsels of British culture, has gulped them down without tasting them, has half-digested them, and has then lowered his arse down and shat them all out again onto a small piece of wood. I’m tempted to say it’s so bad that it’s good, but it isn’t. It’s bad, it’s just bad.     
                  

A joke about Germans that isn't about the war

In my last post, about David Mitchell, Adolf Hitler, and laughing at foreigners, I mentioned how German and Austrians friends get understandably tired of how the British seem to associate their countries so often and so much with the Nazis and World War II.  Then I remembered a joke I heard not so long ago that's about Germans but not about either the Nazis or the war.  And so, in the interests of international cultural understanding and good relations, I am posting the joke herewith....  

A British couple have a baby boy.  And after the birth the doctor tells them, look, okay, the baby’s fine—no problems—but I should tell you, just so you know, that your baby is German.  So the couple are a bit confused about what this means, but they’re okay about it and they go home and everything is fine, except that after a while they notice that the boy is not talking.  By the time he’s four years old they get worried as he’s about to start school, and so they go back to the doctors and the doctors check the boy over very thoroughly but find that he's perfectly fine, and tell the couple that, yes, he's German, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with him and he will learn to talk in his own good time.  So the years go by and the boy doesn’t talk, and every now and then the couple take him to the doctors and every time the doctors say the same thing: he’s German, but he’s fine, be patient, he’ll talk one day.  Then, one day, when he’s 17, the kid is having lunch, and he says to his mother, “Mother, this soup is a little tepid.”  And the mum swings around and says “WHAT?”  And the kid says, “This soup is a little tepid.”  And the mum says, “No. Never mind the soup. You spoke! For the first time in your life, you spoke! Oh my God! Why now? Why haven’t you spoken in all these years, all these seventeen years??!!”  And the kid says, “Because up until now, everysing has been satisfactory".  

Everysing has been
satisfactory

David Mitchell, Hitler, and laughing at foreigners

In this Sunday’s Observer the wonderful David Mitchell wrote about how one of the things that makes him most proud to be British is our national propensity to laugh at Adolf Hitler. The article was occasioned by a complaint by some Israeli tourists about some young British people taking photos of each other next to a wax statue of history’s most horrendous man in Madame Tussaud’s inexplicable celebrity stroke evil-people and oversized-candlestick stroke shit-simulacrum emporium while making Nazi salutes with one hand and simulating a small, square, strange, and silly moustache with the other.  Unfortunately, the upset Israelis thought these young people were being gigantically anti-Semitic.  As the excellent Mitchell pointed out, however, the moustache simulation was the really big clue that these people were just larking about, as opposed to signalling any sort of support of Nazism and the Holocaust.  And, as the National Treasure* also said, laughing at Hitler makes us recall that Hitler was small, stupid, and pathetic, which he was, while in no way diminishing our sense of the despicableness of what he did or in any way disrespecting his victims.  And, furthermore, laughing at him helped people survive the bombs he dropped on the cities, on the people, of this country, and thus helped the Britons of those times to live to fight another day and indeed, with a little bit of help from our friends, defeat Hitler and destroy his hideous regime.  Anyway, why am I trying to represent David Mitchell when you can read his article for yourself?  To try to justify my writing what follows, that’s why.  But if you want to read the full Mitchell piece, and you do, here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/28/hitler-madame-tussauds-david-mitchell 

* Hmm. Is David Mitchell, a mere boy of 35, too young and new to be a National Treasure?  On the one hand, I don’t think so.  He seems perfectly suited to the role to me whatever his age—clearly clever and very funny, yet nicely self-effacing in a perfectly under-statedly British way.  The thing that worries me is that such a status might put too much pressure on him, as he seems the sort of nice person who takes his responsibilities to others tremendously seriously, and so, while that’s part of what makes him deserve the status of National Treasure, it also ought to make us have the mercy to spare him the role.  A dilemma.  But I digress.   

David Mitchell’s article put me in mind of German and Austrian friends who get understandably tired of what they see as a British obsession with World War II and Nazism, or disturbed that we associate their countries with those things and none of the good things they do, like sausages and yodelling.  (Or is that the Swiss?  Don’t get me started on the Swiss, mind!)  There may be some considerable validity in at least the first of those two concerns.  After all, 1945 was pretty much the last time the British were any good at anything significant.  But there is also more to it and, correspondingly, less to it than that.  Part of it is just harmless laughing at foreigners.  Now, yes, I can almost hear some people spluttering, saying, what? it’s okay to laugh at foreigners?  Well, of course it is, as long as it’s based on friendship and fondness, and not on hatred and xenophobia, and as long as you know where to draw the line at offending others’ sensibilities too much.  Or at least are prepared to apologise if you make the mistake of doing so.  It can be done.  I’ve had plenty of practice over the years.  Of course, one can easily offend others, certainly Germans, Austrians, Israelis, and perhaps all Jewish people, when it comes to Hitler.  It is easy to go over the line, and I’ve no doubt that it happens too often and that it hurts.  But it is also, I think, easy to see that there is an inside of the line, however tricky it may be to see exactly where the line is located.  It is easy, I think, to see that not all laughing at the Germans is bad, even in relation to Hitler.  Take perhaps the most famous instance of Brits laughing at the Germans (but not actually laughing at the Germans at all, as argued below): the “Don’t Mention The War” episode of Fawlty Towers.  Clearly, Basil Fawlty is a stereotyped Englishman who is not to be admired.  As if to emphasise that, in that particular episode he has a pratfall and has to go to hospital with a head injury.  Against medical advice, he discharges himself and returns to his hotel, with bandages still conspicuously wrapped around his head, and it is that condition that he does all the goose-stepping, moustache simulating, and mentioning of the war.  The Germans, meanwhile, are portrayed sympathetically as nice and reasonable people.  One of them even cries at Fawlty's antics because, as a German, she or her family suffered in the war.  I can’t remember the details, but they made the point that not all Germans were Nazis.  In other words, “DMTW” did not reduce all Germans and their history to Nazism.  It satirised a certain type of British person who remains ridiculously obsessed about World War II. 

If done with self-awareness, whether doing it yourself or watching John Cleese perform it, there is something inherently hilarious about reducing people of another nationality, in all their diversity and complexity, to a single silly aspect of their culture or their history.  To laugh at others in this way, is really to laugh at yourself and your own human propensity to be absurdly reductive and unfair.  It may even therefore serve a salutary purpose, reminding us that such thought and behaviour is ridiculous and should never be taken seriously, and should definitely not form the ideological basis of any country's foreign policy.  Whatever the case, laughing at foreigners is simply one of the funniest of all funny things, and being laughed at by foreigners is even better because the latter, while merely equally funny to the former, has the added bonus of teaching us something about ourselves, at least sometimes, or at least about what others think of us, which is interesting.  One time when it did both of these things for me, for example, was when American stand-up comedian Reginald D. Hunter observed that “Britain is the only country in the world where a friend will introduce you to a friend of his by saying: this is my mate Barry.  He’s a bit of a twat, but he’s alright.”  This made me *Proud to be British*.  I didn’t realise before how unique our British habit of casually insulting each other in this way is, and it puts in another perspective our propensity to laugh at Hitler and at foreigners generally.  

Sometimes, though, admittedly, laughing at foreigners and being laughed at by foreigners is just plain funny for nothing but the heck of it.  At university in the US I played in a multinational football team in Baltimore (Americans being genetically unable to play football—not “soccer”, football).  During one match I was running up the left wing with the ball and saw our Iranian centre forward, handsome chap, calling my attention for a cross with arm raised and shouting (Dick van Dyke-style), “Ma’e... ma’e... ma’e...”.  It’s hard to cross a ball with the left foot while running and laughing at the same time and I sliced it hopelessly wide of the post.  Our captain and manager was not well pleased.  He, by the way, was a French Johnnie, decent cove nonetheless (in fact, I now remember regularly introducing him to others by saying “This is Philippe: he’s French, but he’s okay”), which led to never-tiresome recitations of such phrases as “Ah em lucking furgh a bowl”.  One training session ended in an early bath for me when le capitaine forgot the English word for a certain body part and had to ask the team “What is the word for this, le coude”, pointing at his elbow.  Our Greek right-winger replied, “It is your dick.”  Yes, that was you, if you happen to be reading this, my old friend, paediatric pulmonologist Dr Harry Opsimos [insert kebab joke here].   

"Ah em lucking furgh a bowl".