walkingtalkingwriting

Men (ak)

Sunday

 

Seven men track a circular course on the Dorset/Somerset border. Seven men of a certain age - somewhere between fifty and eighty. We start from a perfectly preserved, perfectly loved chapel dedicated to St Rocco - patron saint of dogs and those who love them, batchelors, surgeons, pilgrims, tile makers, falsely accused people, invalids, diseased cattle and Istanbul. You must admit a wonderful range of beings to look after. Will he look after us as we set off to face wild dogs, angry farmers who hate the footpaths that cross their land and presumably hate those who use them. How will we run from those who would sink their teeth into us: teeth of dog, teeth of horse, teeth of barbed wire? Seven men who in their different ways are drawn to meet out of some consciousness of being men, not only of a certain age, but out of something troubling about being men.

 

    Perhaps men losing ground, being outmanoeuvred by age, herded, caged by the events of their lives, a lack of missionary purpose. What do you believe in? Not very much - is that the answer? But hang on we could become our own purpose. It's very simple. We are not heroes, not saints, nor particularly sinful sinners: there is an ordinariness that is a burden. Perhaps it's the burden of failure, of a failure to understand what it was (precisely) that we were supposed to do. At least we can help each over the barbed wire, give each other courage as the horses gather round unsure what they might want to do us - bite us, kick us? Who knows?

 

 

Monday – Thursday

 

    Packing and unpacking modernism and the problem of texts, of spinning words into shapes. How to provoke, how to attract attention, how to write the words that are available, that are given to us out of feeling or idea. How to write a non-narrative text with somewhat startling rhythms, surprising content. A text that engages with others, the Other, you or You. A text that may get beyond the response of 'I don't know what you are talking about'. No, I don't know why I have to do this but what can I do, what defence can I plead - I only have the words that are there.

    Then a bit later I'm reading through the day's Guardian (1.10.12) and my eyes light upon John Harris's column in which he discusses a new book due to be published in a couple of weeks. Written by Helen Rosin and given the alarming title: The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Cardboard men who crumple into defeatism and plastic women who are adaptable and (increasingly) well educated. Harris writes: 'The general impression of millions of men as essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind, adds up'. Maybe, maybe not.

    I think I have some sort of notion of what Helen Rosin might be setting out to describe and as she dedicates the book to her nine year old son I want to believe that she is writing (at least in part) out of love. But I also have the sense that it is one of those somewhat weird phenomena that comes under the heading of 'now you see it, now you don't'. What have we men done over history after receiving the drubbing of our lives? Yes, sometimes we disappear in alcoholic stupor - by the way I saw a great little play by the name of Botallack O'clock at the Bike Shed Theatre last night -  abstract artist Roger Hilton drinking himself into psychotic episodes that in the play are both funny and touchingly painful. Botallack is near St Ives where he lived and painted though confined to bed towards the end of his life (he died in 1975) partly due to alcoholism which is the period of his life that the play focuses on. Was he defeated? Was alcohol a way of not feeling the defeat? This artist who had been a commando in the war and taken prisoner after the Dieppe raid. Questions. Questions. But defeat is also a time for reflection, thinking - how do I do this thing? How do I and we walk on?

 

    I'm bound to be reminded of where we were fifteen years ago with those three words - walking and talking and writing. It's probable that we might also demand of ourselves to say something about where we've got to. Or is that the wrong question?

What was it I came here to do? (ak)

Let's check this out. Let's check the arithmetic of memory. I was getting older but there was still (I estimated) plenty of time left, barring accidents and those well known Acts of God or plain and simple murder, come to that. The brief time of innocence between forgetting about nuclear weapons and the advent of global warming had just given us the window of opportunity to launch an attack on the unsuspecting world; heads in the clouds, feet barely touching the the wild flowers in the meadows.

    Fast forward to some time that might or might not be the present, limping along in a desultory fashion; a result of varieties of conflict and trauma, cynical but still raising the standard of hope. Crawling out of bed, aware that we are not going to do anything very much about anything until it becomes a major catastrophe, such as the iconic asteroid that threatens to bring life on Earth to an abrupt end. Come on, get real – it would not be politically expedient. Instead we have been given a gift: Buffoon Boris. We will elect him to oversee our final apotheosis. The process might well be dialectical: Buffoon Boris's apotheosis but BUT our nemesis. Even if we didn't vote for the Billy Bunter raiding the tuck shop lookalike. Was our collective act one of hubris? Of course I'm getting mixed up in my tenses; suggesting an act in the past when some might feel it belongs in the future. But the confusion of tenses is appropriate because the damage has already been done. It happened when I was asleep.

    Dreaming, in fact, of something very different; the sweep of brushstroke that has picked up the energy of the centre, pulling it towards the periphery but then surprisingly executing the most exquisite curve and leading us back to the centre. Or at least that is apparently what is happening. Is that Greedy Guts hanging helplessly from the centre?

    The question remains: how do we find our way our of the Hayek maze of wondrous hallucinations? Can we sidestep the dazed bankers, the shell shocked monkeys from News Corp facing criminal charges?

    Or another question: how to support and help democracy to evolve? Rather than, in our sense of powerlessness we opt out of democratic struggle even at the basic level of voting. Was it somebody writing in the Daily Telegraph who accused Danny Boyle of sneaking a Marxist analysis into the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics?

    We all have to fight our way into the future. Even if the advantages and disadvantages handed out are so weighted in certain socially conditioned ways. But at the same time we have to work out what happened yesterday in the face of rampant amnesia and varieties of dementia. We, obviously cannot see the myths that currently construct our thinking, not until they are broken and burning on the bonfire of the yesterday's vanities.

    Missy Sniper is a version of the Republican/Tea Party/NRA fantasy: it can all be sorted out at the end of a gun. Just make sure YOU are the one with the finger on the trigger. Don't let those other buggers get their fingers in on the act. WE CAN BE TRUSTED (oh yeah!) THEY CAN'T. Let's hear it for Pussy Riot. Dancing in the cathedral and offering a prayer for the demise of Vlad Putin. Well why not? What's the problem?

Get Real (ak)

At the worst of times I’m an anti-poet atheist; at the best of times I don’t give a monkey’s; it is so irrelevant that my mind remains unblemished by such filth. And more importantly I’ve got to get out of this place – the lyrics of a song swirled briefly – if it’s the last thing I ever do. Did the words refer to the factory the singer, or at least the song’s writer, worked in, still living, squashed, in his parents terraced house; dreaming of a future with his girl friend? Poetry, of course, is simply smashed up prose. What some people do instead of getting to grips with the real world.

    To be honest I have no idea how many ‘floors’ I have already descended. Didn’t she say two floors down?

    I was supposed to be finding the Trumpet Trawler courtesy of Pring the Poet. The thought of bashing my head against the wall suddenly appeared to be the height of sanity. It might help. But look, is this a hopeful sign? The landing I was descending towards was a blaze with lights and not only that but I could now see vast double doors; ancient polished oak with lustrous brass fittings. Surely this was worth a blast of trumpets! It was only later that I, with delayed panic, wondered what I would have done if the doors had been locked, but instead I yanked eagerly at the left hand door and it swung open with delicious ease and I was confronted with a dazzlingly bright morning. Half blinded I staggered down the few steps, ears assailed by the scream of gulls. Smells of the ocean, of fish, of diesel, of people bewildered me. All my senses were working overtime. I had to eat what saw. I had to taste it, touch it. Milling crowds pushed me this way and that, but always closer to the hive of activity on the wharves. But this wasn’t the non-world of luxury yachts this was work, real work. The life dragged from the oceans glittered in variegated mounds. The knives of those gutting and cleaning flashed in the sun with impossible speed.

    I felt the hand slipping into the inside pocket of my jacket but by this time my hands were trapped at my sides by the press of the crowd. It was too late to fight. And then I was falling on to the deck of the Dreamboat. I was grateful that nobody bothered me as I lay in semi-conscious dreaming only in some tiny part of my mind aware that the Dreamboat was edging its way through the throng of boats towards the open sea.

    But why was it necessary to have all evidence of my past and only life removed?

    Move up there, a male voice, harsh, brittle. I tried to move but it didn’t seem at all easy.

    Then he leaned in close, are you a friend of Massimo’s?

 

What about remaking, rethinking, revisioning? (ak)

Christopher Turner (LRB 5 July 2012) in his review of the Barbican exhibition: Bauhaus: Art as Life, quotes Gropius’s manifesto that called for a unity between art and craft, a unity that would ‘rise one day towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystalline symbol of a new faith’ and to facilitate ‘a community that wanted to create a new man in a new environment.’

    Where do any of us stand in relation to this linchpin of an ambition? What sort of work or practice would it take to bring enough light into our beings to make us ‘better’ people? Do we even believe that it is possible? And what is the evidence for change in us?

    Visiting an old friend recently, it seemed to me that he was much the same as he was when I met him more than forty years ago. There was the same strong ethical thread informing his behaviour as well as being an opportunistic chancer who was able to charm his way across social, professional and bureaucratic boundaries. And when I, in turn, reflected on any possible changes in me that I could detect, I see the same short sighted, shy individual with a poor instinctive sense of reality, who has to rely on books to aid him in building some useable concepts of reality. Sort of.

    Because there is a strand of doubt which hardly believes that locked into our subjective/objective tensions we have never and will never finally describe reality. And this idea or belief is central to this blog and then, of course, there is a but, quite a big but:

    But we can be tantalised, seduced, persuaded, entertained, enraged and engaged as we pursue these strange and surprising, not to say outrageous, gods of language. 

 

Necessary Confusions (ak)

Not really a circular journey because that presupposes that the person who comes back is the person who set out all those days, months or years before. But we are confined to our spherical prison under the stars and under the sun. Renzo Piano’s Shard points the way out. The straight line must be the stuff of imagination. It informs, lends a narrow beam of light to our lives. Enables us to pretend that we have pushed God off ‘his’ throne and replaced him with . . . what? Science, psychoanalysis, all sorts of possibilities come to mind. And we really can tell stories . . . well, some of us can and some of us are rubbish at it.

 

 

 

 The Flags Are Out

 

The flags are out – no I don’t why either . . .

but we may have to bend ourselves to the collective will.

 

The deer came out of nowhere; no, that’s not quite true

it obviously came out of somewhere.

 

It emerged in a rush from the hedge on my right

startled by my appearance before her, two or three metres

 

from her, she swerved and plunged into the opposite hedge.

A brief encounter with the wild – a second from

 

a collision that I imagine would have left me

sprawling in the road because she was all force.

 

A force intent on evasion and survival

making a life on the margins of the human dominated landscape.

 

Bright eyed maenad alive with perfection; one being intensity

tearing me limb from limb; flesh organs bones into

 

the mincer. The fat red-faced cook turning the handle

with gusto, eyes libidinously merry,

 

dreaming of such a dish to set before the king;

Spices and fruit bursting with juices

 

bursting on the jaded palates of a thousand diners.

Come overwhelm me, my darling –

 

this is something special: to be remade

to enter the hunt, to outwit time

 

to twist and shout exulting the joy, to fall

to touch the cathartic as an equal; to die as she dies

 

because each day I must enter her once more

in order to find what I must be.

 

(Alan Kirby 2012)

 

Threads and Traces (ak)

I think of networks of nerves and blood vessels, I think of love that touches and enables new organisation to take shape, I think of a sheep trapped in barbed wire; the paths that open out into the journey and those that apparently come to what we call a ‘dead’ end. A few weeks ago I could not help but notice the body of a black cat killed by the rushing of motorised traffic as I cycled out, vulnerable, myself, to the possibilities of the same fate. A mile or two of A road before I can dive off into the network of lanes that connect farms and hamlets, wriggling and clinging up hill and down dale; a maze to disorientate, to visit sleepy hollows, and present new and surprising vistas that I didn’t know existed. The black cat’s cadaver was in the middle of the carriageway, recognisably cat-like, but it wasn’t long before it was flattened, bones crushed, soft tissue squeezed out, perhaps nibbled by creatures that have a taste for that sort of carrion fast-food – crows and the like. Then a couple of weeks later it looked like a scrap of fur rug and by this time it had moved (been moved?) into the edge of the road, more or less right in my path and finally in the last week or two all that remains are three or four scuffs of black something-or-other across the white line; something that I no longer bother to avoid. A mere trace of something that had lived and breathed and been loved.

    Earlier this morning I read Paul Durcan’s The Road to Vétheuil 2009 (from Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being)  and loved how it traces a path of love from walking ‘downhill to the village’ to the opening of the door and ‘we embraced and we burst out laughing.’ And the final six lines:

        ‘We stood face to face, talking nonsense,

        Not having seen one another for six months.

        Delighted to be doing that, and that only,

        And not being expected to do or say anything else

        But simply to be there and nowhere else

        Piping absolute, pure, spontaneous song.’

    Alain Badiou (In Praise of Love) writes (something else I read this morning): ‘ . . . between May ’68 and the Eighties . . . I developed the political conviction I have remained implacably loyal to and for which “communism” is one possible name. But I then equally structured my future life around processes of love that were by and large definitive. What came later, of the same order, was illuminated by that inspiration and its enduring nature . . . That was really the moment when, in between politics and love, my life found the musical chord that ensured its harmony.’

    The image of the project that we call life that is suggested by Badiou's words is that of a musical instrument (take your choice of instrument!). We are given the rough outline and we struggle daily and in our dreams at night to refine the trumpet or violin, to clarify what sort of instrument it is, learn to play it, engage with our resistances – when the teacher says sing, well, sing for God’s sake . . . but no, I can’t, I won’t, leave me alone, I’m in too much pain, I’m too distracted.

    And here is Tonto peering at the traces, the hoof print in the soft earth, the broken twig. He’ll know which we must go

 

What, you’re not there yet!! (ak)

All this time as a maturing man . . . my goodness, when can we cut him down and serve him with a bowl of French fries and a glass of chilled champagne in that “night club” of his? Let’s get on with it. We need strength for the journey; we need sustaining for goodness sake even if we are heading for that crest of the wave when maturing slips over into dementing. Or perhaps it’s the same thing: maturing must mean getting old and smelly; dementing means that we are past caring – unaware – unconscious aging. The dictionary suggests that there is no verb to dement, therefore I should not use dementing, it gives the wrong idea, as though I am doing something to myself. But why not? To be is a verb and is not quite a doing word. So is maturing I do something with conscious intention. Not sure – yes and no. I suppose drinking alcohol would be an example of conscious dementing and going to chat to my analyst an example of conscious maturing.

    When did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver come out? Oh yeah, 1976, I checked on Wikipedia. Anyway, the point is I watched it last night having rented the DVD. The fact is I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen it or whether I only imagined I had seen it because it’s one of those movies that entered what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious (if there is such a thing?). After watching it I’m still not sure whether I saw it in 1976 or 77 but I'm inclined to the view that I didn't see it. Could be I didn’t, because I wasn’t getting to the movies very much as that point in my life. Checking the Scorsese filmography on Wikipedia I noticed Mean Streets which came out a couple of years before Taxi Driver. Perhaps that was the one I saw. So this might be about venturing into the territory, reminding me of Dartmoor once again, of my dementing. But for the moment let’s stay with the movie. Robert de Niro’s Travis is a fascinating creation of a character, coming into America post-Vietnam, an ex-marine, probably traumatised, cannot sleep, finds a job as a taxi driver and occupies a fine line between maturing and dementing. The question that is so gripping is, is he going to make it? Which mainly means, will he survive? But also demands some clarity as to notions of maturing/dementing. He seems to have little in the way of self protective mechanisms operating. Is that another consequence of the PTSD? To what degree does he represent a socially inadequate character irrespective of whatever happened to him in Vietnam. So, yes, the various Jimmy’s and their questioning of what it is to live and survive or not. Travis even has a go at falling in love which doesn’t get far when he takes his dream of woman to a pornographic movie because it is just another film and besides he doesn’t know anything about films. Later, her boss, a presidential hopeful, happens to get into his taxi and Travis makes out he really admires this politician, though he knows nothing about politics, which in turn invites the presidential hopeful to ask him about what he’d like to see happen. Given permission Travis spews out a stream of paranoid stuff about clearing out the filth of the city and then it’s not long before he’s buying guns.

    It’s a fine essay on maturing and dementing, the socially isolated and excluded, heading for an explosion of some sort.

    I better get along to my analyst.

 

Nurburgring : Writing Across Boundaries (mmj)

A cast iron handle to a trap door, then down some steep slippery steps. Are you counting? And then a passageway. At the end of which a glimmer of light. A group of men. Laughter. A nightclub, and a red light inside.

Then down some slippery steps. Are you counting? Have you reached thirty nine? And what makes you think that your story last week “must be a dream”?

And, another thing, don’t apologise (it is editorial policy here not to). Don’t apologise about “James”: James Hunt (sic: meaning ‘as it is’). World Racing Champion. 1976. Hot year. Driving for McClaren and smoking forty a day. On the edge of the racing line and going flat out on the Nurburgring circuit heading for that corner where your friend’s car is already on fire.

I am counting. Because at a precise moment, the story goes that it is at the number thirty nine or in the next few seconds, I am meant to do something. Maybe it is to change gear. Maybe it is to hit the brakes. Maybe it is to start running. Or to stop. At this split-second moment I can’t remember which. How much adrenalin is pumping? Or is it the fear? Fear driving the fear.

The next six seconds, thirty nine steps, or 127 Hours. I hadn’t thought about that film much until about a month ago (based on the true story of professional mountaineer Aron Ralston). I was looking for books to recommend for a ‘Navigating Serious Illness’ section of a health chapter I was writing for a book for maturing men, and came across The Power of Two: Surviving Serious Illness with an Attitude and an Advocate by Brian and Geri Monaghan (Workman Publishing, New York. 2009). Brian and Geri keeping going; he was seriously ill, she became his health advocate, and it was Brian who told me how much he had got from the film 127 Hours. Theirs is one of the best books of "experience and common sense" I know on the subject of serious illness.

The path of Conscious Ageing? An Elders Rite of Passage? Post-traumatic growth? “James”: this time another James. James Hawkins writes across the boundaries in his latest two posts in his Good Medicine blog about the “most intense, prolonged, potentially catastrophic experience of my life”, and about the “lessons, self-compassion and post-traumatic growth”.

About his 3 Hours: three hours down a snow shute above a cliff in the mountains of Skye. I dwell on every word and rejoice in his rescue! James says he writes, “both personally and as a therapist”, and, I would add, writing across the boundaries of humanity about:
…wayfaring / the primacy of movement / the nature and constitution of the ground / divergent perspectives of earth as ground of habitation and scientific object / the intercourse of earth and sky, wind and weather / the fluidity and friction of materials / the experience of light, sound and feeling / what it means to make things / drawing and writing/ storytelling (this list as it happens is borrowed from Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (2012)).

I am not there yet, but I am still counting.

Whoops, what’s this? (ak)

I thought it was the lashing rain that woke me, but no, there is something digging into my back. Actually it’s not exactly a foxhole, at least not according to the image I have. Foxholes are either foxholes, which are really tunnels, or a depression in the earth/mud that infantry soldiers dig in a hurry for protection. This is always the problem with metaphors when you begin to examine them. What I have in mind are the various depressions around the Eastern White Barrow not far from the Avon Reservoir. The barrow itself is takes the shape of a nipple-shaped cairn constructed out of lumps of granite – quite a good landmark as long as the mist keeps away. I wonder if the depressions are the result of mining activity around that area. Miners following their threads of tin, leaving marks of their activity, the remains of blowing houses. It must have been a hard life; hard in a way that I probably can only fail to imagine. But I can borrow that mining as a metaphor for this writing process: digging, searching, seeking that trail of what is valuable, following threads that maybe lead nowhere, to nothing but exhaustion. I could, I suppose, trudge downhill through the tussocks and cross the Avon and climb the hill on that side to the pillow mounds, the remains of the rabbit warrens created a hundred and fifty years ago.

    But why bother, let’s get back to the story. The thing that is pressing so uncomfortably into my back is (of course) the circular cast-iron handle of a trap-door. There has to be a way out. Although one wonders why the LibDems don’t take the obvious path of walking away from the coalition that is destroying them. Perky Clegg was reported as being ‘sad’ about his fellow LibDem members who had lost out in Thursday’s local elections. Though it has to be said he is not looking quite so Perky these days; rather more pale, even ghostly. Pinky Vampire Cameron is meanwhile looking as well fed as ever. But I suppose this is Cleggy’s only possible holding of a position of power.

    We better get down these slippery slimy steps without further ado. Progress is slow, each step has to be felt for with nothing to hold on to except the uneven and slimy stone on the right. My left hand meanwhile touches nothing when I reach out in that direction . . . so better try not to think about what that implies.

    Why has Ken Livingstone started appearing with a dog; a cuddly Labrador? Does it make him appear more human? He might be very ready with anti-Semitic one-liners but he does like dogs – he can’t be all bad, especially when compared with the straw thatched dummy opposite.

    Perhaps we are getting somewhere the steps have finished and the passageway is more or less level and, am I imagining it or is there a glimmer of light ahead. Oh yes, here we are, I must have arrived, there’s a crowd milling around. There are bursts of laughter. Though now I notice that it’s an all male crowd. So what does that mean? A bit like school days. And like school days there is some pushing and shoving, as we try to work our way to the head of the queue. This must be a dream. Why didn’t I realise before? Because now we are outside, it’s still night though, the light is from a street lamp and we are in a street of rather shabby Victorian terraces. Perhaps this is a nightclub of some sort. And now I’m getting closer to the entrance I see the light inside is red! And some of the men look vaguely familiar as people often do it dreams.

“Hey, don’t I know you?’

Apparently not. Men looking furtive. Men reaching into their pockets and pulling out fistfuls of money, twenty pound notes by the look of it. ‘Look I’m sorry I don’t have any money with me – it’s a mistake, I shouldn’t be here – I just . . . ‘

‘Cheap I might be, but not that cheap.’ Smudged mascara, like bruised eyes, a spangly dress hanging on thin shoulders. There is, I notice, a developing arousal, an excitement; but as usual I’m out of step with what’s going on. Missed my chance, again.

Crazy dreams. Hey it’s getting light, maybe time to get up.

Oh and sorry to James Hunt for getting Jeremy mixed up with you last week.

 

Oh what endless fun (ak)

Sometimes, in conversations, in responding to what others are saying, we (I) say what we want to be, or that we believe should be, true rather than what is true. As usual watching our politicians is enormously instructive in this regard. It is not possible to say nothing because, well, they are supposed to be pretending to be in charge, to be responding positively to whatever crisis has arisen. But on the other hand they often have nothing intelligent to say, they are in fact overwhelmed, but obviously can’t admit it, so then they are dependent on slippery advisers to dream up some form of words that they hope will hide their nakedness. Time has become so condensed and is in such short supply that effectively there is no time. All those who cannot pretend to keep up fall by the wayside. In fact, it seems that we need new migrants coming in with each tide who are desperate enough to work flat out for any number of hours for a pittance before they are reduced, burnt out and the next wave are ready to take their places.

    At least they don’t lie about ‘trickle down’ these days. The gloves are off: this is how it is; you better get used to it. How long will it be before the financial elite and their propagandists persuade us that democracy is actually not working and it should be jettisoned in favour of . . . what? An unelected national unity government?

    Hello, this cosy little foxhole on Dartmoor is getting rather crowded – surely we can’t all fit in. Alright, alright, I’m moving up, don’t shout.

    Don’t get in a panic, our current form of democracy was always a bit of sham, a bit of a first attempt; after all those two arrogant posh boys – Giddy Osborne and Pinky Cameron – have been educated at the country’s finest establishments, so they must know what is best for us.

    You are right, of course, we are endlessly corruptible. Perhaps the only person existing on this planet who isn’t must be Aung San Suu Kyi. The rest of us are constantly caught with our trousers down in the midst of overwhelming confusions of desire. I want to fit in but I don’t agree with you. I wish I could be you but I can’t, I’m not; there are these different thoughts in my mind but on the other hand it’s a bit too scary to be separate for more than a few moments so I’ll shut up and agree with you even if I don’t agree with you. It’s simpler this way and maybe I’ll get something out of it. You know what I mean!

    I mean, could you, you know, make it worth my while.

    Anyway, what do I know?

    Did you see that grinning buffoon James Hunt after he was outed by all those emails? And the only way he managed to stutter though his statement in the Commons was to have Cameron’s finger thrust up his fundament. Or two fingers, perhaps. Come along, Jimmy, let’s see if we can talk our way out of this one. At least there was a submissive special adviser ready to fall on his sword to protect the boss who knew nothing about what was going on.

    Oh, what endless fun. A sudden possible insight: has something been done to our politicians, some surgical procedure performed in an exclusive private hospital to change politicians into stand-up comedians. And are the real politicians those who have admitted to being stand-up comedians? Or am I simply a slow learner and politicians have always been stand-up comedians?

    I think you should institute an immediate investigation.

    And I suppose by this time you have already ordered that book, but please don’t talk about being alive to Giddy and Pinky. Nobody has told them. Yet. They will have such a shock.