Reign of the Magic Badger

The bear my mother received for Christmas contains a belly full of lavender and various strange ingredients designed to retain both heat and cold. It can be used as a kind of mild ice pack to sooth aches and pains, but its chief purpose is to provide a gentle warmth and heady scent that lulls the owner to sleep, and never mind that lavender is a hellish scent that is like having your nose bitten off by an old woman.

The trouble comes when you heat up the bear. To do so you have to microwave it for three minutes; watching this poor creature gently rotating, a blank expression on its furry face as it slowly cooks before your eyes... it can break the hardest of hearts. For the sadistic parent, this is a godsend; buy this thing for your children, set up a video camera and you will be able to record for posterity the very moment they lose their innocence forever and turn to injecting heroin directly into each other's eyeballs.

We personify the strangest things. Our minds are hardwired to detect faces in the most mundane object... there are more foods with images of Jesus on them nowadays than ones without. Eating a bag of peanuts is like chewing your way through the entire Bible, with a small Koran chaser. Hmm... A somewhat pantheist concept, all in all. God is in everything, and if your appetite is ruined, then what the hell. You can always stick it behind velvet ropes and charge an entrance fee, or sell it on Ebay for hundreds of pounds.

Those people need to be stopped. The sooner people understand that there is a good reason that modern miracles are restricted to weird sensory perception and lazy conjuring tricks, the better. Or is our faith being tested? God could project images of the future onto the side of Mt Everest, but he chooses to pull rabbits out of a top hat sitting on a conveniently hutch-shaped table. It seems to be the way dieties works in most religions. The proof of his existence is that you cannot technically disprove something that by its very nature is beyond science...

Which is why I now announce the existence of Tom the Magic Badger. He cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, touched or found in the stylings of a pork scratching. Unlike ghosts and Bigfoot, Tom cannot be caught on camera by people with shaky video cameras with no focusing capability. Tom is not made up of protons and electrons, but magic dust. But if you disbelieve in him and fail to give money to the new organisation I have built in his honour, he will cause...oh, I don't know...he will cause it to rain on the very day you forgot to take your umbrella to work. Eat that, you swine!

So go on, disprove Tom the Magic Badger. I can wait, say, the next two thousand years for an answer...

Ah, but we are wading here into the nature of belief, and it is a tedious swamp of irreconcilable arguments that should not concern us. All we need to know is that belief is a vital part of our history - our cultural and societal advancement would have been much slower without it - and as long as we believe in ensuring that the sum total of our acts is good, why make it any more complicated?

Yup, having taken a well-worn potshot, I cloak myself with an excuse and wander off into the evening. Who knows, maybe tonight I'll locate a salted pretzel in the shape of the Buddha and make my fortune... And if you argue, I'll string you up for blasphemy. Deal?

A Present from the West

The air has been bitterly cold recently, but today a terrible western wind is blowing, and for the first time in ages it is almost warm. Cold comfort, though, when you are being dragged down the street with a tornado up your back passage. Hmm...maybe it wasn't that bad, but this is the time of year for tall tales. Why not?

So I stepped out of the house this morning into the gale and was shocked at the sheer violence of the gusts. I half expected to see people being carried off by the wind, hundreds of umbrella-wielding housewives shrieking across the skies like a grotesque army of valium-addicted Mary Poppinses. Oh, for an air pistol... Dismissing such idle thoughts, I looked around me. The landscape was not faring well. Patio tables were jumping from garden to garden, and wheelie bins looked like corpses on the street. Half-dead trees bowed down before me, and unsecured fences flapped madly in the gardens of people busy elsewhere...probably squabbling on an Easyjet landing in some overcrowded European city somewhere. "City", in this case, meaning a battered airport fifty miles away from anywhere, with toilets made of cardboard and a taxi rank full of blind drunk men with warty noses who respond to your questions by cackling and tapping their nose knowingly...but I digress.

Half way to the shops and a massive ridge tile was blown off a nearby roof and landed with a horrible crash somewhere behind me. Ye gods, I thought. This happened twice more on the way back...as if the ghost of Fred Dibnah was dancing on the rooftops with a pocketful of dynamite and a head full of crazy thoughts. By this time my heart was in my throat and I clutched ever harder onto my copies of Private Eye and the Guardian. The power of liberalism will save me, I thought. Any roof detritus that comes flying at me would be swatted away like confetti...and any wind-crazed idiots who didn't look where they were going - well, I could roll up the newspaper and get liberal on them in a way that would make the Marquis de Sade weep with joy.

Naturally I was glad to get back indoors. And even more so when I noticed none of the fallen tiles were from my roof.

As I write this, the wind continues to gust viciously. The letterbox chatters loudly to itself and the telephone wire outside the window is bouncing around like a boxer's skipping rope. But never mind. The forecast says that the wind is set to die down tomorrow...but this is of less concern to them than their excited chatter about parts of Great Britain being covered in snow on Christmas Day. Michael Fish is betting against it, and any winnings will go to charity.... Good god, has Max Clifford been sniffing around his gaffe since this most genial of weathermen retired?

In practice a large Christmas day snowfall is good news only for children. True, the rest of us will light the fire and gaze admiringly at the glistening landscape, but then we will curse the very name of God as we realise we are the one who has to drive across town to pick up the relatives.

But what the hell. I do not drive. And I will hole myself up inside on the day itself as usual, whether the sun is shining or a blizzard is raging. I will surround myself with the true meaning of Christmas...the kind destined to fill up a bottle bank on January 2nd. Happy Christmas!

A Strange Book is Slammed Shut...

In the middle of The Simpsons, as the commercial break begins, a strange voice interrupts...

Yikes! David Blunkett has resigned after all. He is now on television giving a quiet and meek little interview, shedding tears and "taking responsibility" for the fast-tracked Visa over and over again...yet there is a strange lack of any guilt here. He has ridden a weird ride for the last two and a half weeks, trying to keep control but repeatedly hitting oil patches...and this resignation is unexpected, given Blair's support.

Already the resignation is being portrayed as a noble act...and we are now being told that, like Boris Johnson's exit from his party, this appears to turn on a single point. He denied that the Visa was fast-tracked, and we now know that it was. It was not Blunkett's fault, we are told, but it was his department. What are we to make of that? Is this really the whole story? For a career that has frequently resembled an unstoppable and arrogant armoured truck, for it to spin off into the ditch on such a minor B-road is bizarre. Maybe we have to look at the environment itself, rather than the man. Blunkett has lost many friends in the last month...his autobiography was hemlock in the tea of too many people at the wrong time.

Oh dear, footage of Michael Howard causing bad music to be played in the Commons...mocking Tony Blair about the Blunkett autobiography, leading to a scene of chaos and people turning their heads in embarrassment...has Howard now got what he wanted? He will be polled for his reaction soon enough and he will doubtless be sorry to see him go, paying tribute to his political nous... The stupid, creepy man. The Conservatives fucked up by installing that one on their machines; they mistook brutal lunacy and crowd-pleasing for strength, and when the bubbles began to pop and his eyes started to spin in their sockets, they lauded him for his ability to scare the opposition. They may as well have elected a Halloween pumpkin lantern...at least they could have made soup afterwards.

And now David Davies, shadow Home Secretary, is on, claiming he feels sorry for Blunkett and that "there is no pleasure in this"...his arrogant face is leering out of the television as he scrambles for the high ground. But his eyes betray him. There is victory in his expression and a subtle sense of derision in his mannerisms.

So...I was wrong when I said that he would not resign. But I was right when I said "all they need to do is to catch him in one big lie for them to cite the Boris Johnson precedent; that is, shag around all you like, just don't lie to the faithful". These events are a reminder that no matter how well armed is the man, it is his environment which will result in his death or glory. I am not sorry to see him go because he has made some inexcusable political decisions, and to hell with how he is seen by his constituants.

And the news is over and the summary says that Blunkett "leaves his office with his integrity intact..."

Well, perhaps. This may well prove to have been the best time for him to get out of the belly of the beast and concentrate on his domestic matters without any mud sticking to his record. Leaving now means that he will be forever seen in a "what if" light... he could have been a prime minister... he could have been a contender... a great man brought low by tittle tattle... Ah, whatever. He has gone and has every chance of making a comeback soon enough. It's just a shame nobody in the home office remembered to shove Blunkett's ID cards up his arse as he left the building.

When Sirens Sing Unfamiliar Songs

The end of the week… there is plenty of good electricity in my head this morning. My job is practically over and I have many thoughts to address. The new flat is arranged and already barking for financial attention, but this is something about which I can relax for a short time; now I can go to ground whilst the deposit cheques and forms bounce around the postal system. Right now I am more occupied with tomorrow's gig, which promises to provide an evening of blissful, musical fireworks in the head. The name A Silver Mt. Zion means nothing to most people, but to those of us who have bought the albums and paid for tickets, this is set to be a rare and special moment in time.

Really, I have not bought enough music this year. This is a strange thought to behold, but I have not been lacking in music, with John Peel three nights a week and Radio 3's Mixing It on Friday nights providing me with a constant source of new stuff. Actually, I was one of the few people who liked everything that Peel played…nothing was too weird for me and in the end I believe I was alone in wishing he would play less white indie guitar. Nevertheless, these music shows, no matter how great, are more of an aperetif…the main course lies in the full albums I have not been buying.

Curiously, despite loving so much of the music Peel played, I never bought a huge amount of CDs based on the bands he championed. Perhaps the tracks that stood out the most for me are the ones that were too hard to track down. Too obscure, too vinyl or not on any album…the amount of superb floor-shaking drum'n'bass classics I missed out on through an intense fear of 12 inch records turns me cold. But whatever the reason, in my life I have bought more music through reading magazines. Before closing down at the start of the year, Jockey Slut was a useful musical source, as was Uncut before it became a bloated, middle-aged and pot bellied disappointment of a magazine that ditched any trappings of supporting inventive music and decided to wallow full time in tired nostalgia.

Hmm. Where is this going? What was I leading up to? One of these days I will get round to a comprehensive study of online music, particularly the radio stations. I believe these can be an essential part of my listening life, once I have suitable access to it. I once spent a day at work trawling the digital seas for anything worthwhile...a radio station I can tune in at any time of the day and enjoy is my own personal holy grail. (1250 results) What I found was Eastern European country music, Japanese ambient synth pop and foul talk radio. Utterly bug-eyed perhaps, but always surprising… and a damn good thing too. I have never been one of those watery-eyed whores who buy a CD single and then listen to them over and over again until the laser pops a sprocket. To hell with that, and to hell with pop music in general.

Ah, but that is another debate and I am tired of its insidious tentacles. Even broadsheet newspapers are writing self-satisfied articles in praise of pop music as if this is somehow proving some frightfully important point about music and snobbery, when all it really does is throw dust into the faces of weary straw men.

We are bombarded with these irrelevant and disingenous arguments at all times these days and some of them bother us more than others. Many people like throwing arguments at situations that don’t exist, thus creating the situation in the first place, and I believe that too many people are being defined by how much they argue. It makes reading the news a stomach-churning activity. Then again, we always knew that the news is Bad For You, and now we have proof (see this article). Besides, there is too much bad blood in our daily politics for us not to be splattered with at least some of it.

For the worst of this bad blood we turn to Northern Ireland. The playground self-aggrandising of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley continues and is deep into a blame-fuelled malaise that could take weeks to address. The respective leaders of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists have been playing bollock conkers for so long now that they exist in a sensory-depriving fog of pride and belief in some crazy historical context that will favour them and them alone. They are unaware that the rest of the world is slapping their heads in disbelief with each statement and retaliation. They can hear the sound of clapping from the gallery…this appears to them to be some kind of partisan statement of encouragement but is, in reality, a slow hand clap that is saying "get off the goddamn stage". The light is bright at the end of the tunnel, but the bastards just won't walk those last few yards.

"The latest IRA statement of self-justification only serves to convince the decent people of Northern Ireland of the fact that the IRA had never any intention of decommissioning." -- Ian Paisley

"Decent people?" Ye gods. So on the flip side there must be a lot of obviously indecent people who oppose his argument…all desperate for death and chaos and madness, right?

But he went off the deep end long ago and the bubbles in his blood are growing bigger by the day. He is managing to make Gerry Adams look reasonable now; demanding that the IRA film the decommissioning of its weaponry is a futile statement based not upon what "decent people" give a damn about, but is part of this fog of pride that stops him engaging with anything but his own political ego. With the IRA willing to decommission, Paisley is playing a weird game, and in a strange way brings to mind a scene from The Man With Two Brains, where Steve Martin is stopped by the police in Austria and forced to perform increasingly elaborate drunk tests.

Paisley: Get out of the car. Start decommissioning your weapons!

Adams: Very well. It is done.

Paisley: Now do a rollover, turnover and flip-flop whilst taking a photograph of yourself decommissioning your weapons!

Adams: We do this under protest but it is done…

Paisley: Now juggle these, do a tap dance and sing the Catalina Magdalena Luptenschteiner Volunbeiner song!

Adams: God DAMN your disarmament tests are hard!

But to hell with this squabbling…history will play itself out and both sides will be portrayed for all time as proud but ineffectual fools, and it will be a lesson in how atavistic chest-beating leads to nothing but misery for everyone in the blast radius.

Okay…this appears to have terminally drifted away from music and has already gone on far too long. But the Christmas season is upon us and starting from tomorrow I will be as far away from the suffocating office environment as possible for at least three weeks. These weary bulletins I have been writing for a while now are likely to be more sporadic in that time, and I make no apology for this. Things are changing in my life and they demand my attention. But I will always need to write, and so this insane jabbering will need to continue. What the hell, eh?

Stock Phrase Market Update #3

Share price equals the number of results from the Google News (UK) search box given by each phrase. Phrases entered in quotation marks. Changes in price shown in the table reflect the previous week. High and Low prices based on daily results.

Raft of Measures…80…(-3, Hi 99, Lo 77)
So To Speak …1850…(-60, Hi 1930, Lo 1740)
The Holy Grail …1220…(+381, Hi 1230, Lo 713)
The New Black …120…(-25, Hi 150, Lo 117)
The Rest is History …296…(-38, Hi 341, Lo 281)
Will Never Be The Same Again …92…(+3, Hi 92, Lo 82)

Our final update brings few surprises, which allows us to reach a few conclusions. Journalism is a fast moving business and there is never time to do things properly. These hackneyed phrases provide a shortcut, an instant and familiar image that readers will immediately grasp. The terminology may not make any sense upon analysis; in fact, it is only their repetition that validates them. So somebody betting on the number of their appearances in the news will find the results fairly predictable; clichés are self-perpetuating and there will always be writers in need of a comfortably familiar phrase.

But then a certain world event will yank a particular phrase out of the slime and, for a week or so at least, hose it down and wave it around for all to see. One news source will use a phrase and it will stick; our results will temporarily skyrocket, before settling back down. The Queen's speech, for instance, sent the results for "raft of measures" up into the 90s for a week before settling down to a constant figure around 80. Since many newspapers rely on the wires so much, perhaps they are the ones who seed this ugly plantation of stock phrases.

Sometimes events can take a knife to our analysis, and this was so with The Holy Grail. Our stock phrase market is supposed to concentrate on the use of phrases as clichés…The Holy Grail is such a phrase, but it is also the name of a mythological relic out of which people still manage to squeeze news stories and films. And with a recent surge in stories about the relic, our metaphorical Grail is buried, and our analysis becomes meaningless.

But what the hell? This was a minor experiment and it proved nothing but the obvious. The only thing we can really take away from this is that new clichés appear all the time (Private Eye's latest column on overused phrases is "solutions", used by companies to mean any imaginable business product), but it takes genuine skill to disappear them. Even once half the nation begin spoofing such hackneyed dross as "[something] is the new black", examples in the papers continue to be prevalent. Of course the phrase is used ironically in many instances, but this joke is over almost immediately, and the ironic use of the phrase becomes as dull-minded as the original usage.

Here ends the experiment.

Remainders of the Day

Last night, whilst breaking into a publishing house that shall remain nameless, I found an intriguing list amongst the piles of cash and unsold copies of Graham Norton's autobiography. It was a list of books to be published ready for Christmas 2005. My interest was piqued, and in the gloom I began to study the list.

Something seemed wrong. It felt like I had read this list before. It took me moments to realise why; the titles of the books were eerily similar to this year's Christmas list. As I gathered these thoughts, a light whooshed on and a security guard stood towering over me. I kneed him in the groin and bolted, tossing in a match behind me as I climbed out of the window. The fire soon spread to half the city, but it was the rubbish half and nobody noticed.

Below are some of the books from the list I confiscated.

The Little Book of Crap Telegraph Poles

Do you have a crap telegraph pole on your street? If so, will you ever be able to show your face in public again? Your friends will lie on their backs like dogs and waggle their legs in the air at the sheer hilarity of this hilarious and witty book. Perfect for people with absurd senses of humour! And smug, fuckwitted twenty-somethings who think swearing and Jeremy Clarkson are funny.

The Little Book of Comedy Letters

Do you find the idea of bothering anonymous secretaries amusing? Jolly good. So does everyone else! A hundred of the funniest made-up letters from a self-satisfied arsehole to various companies around the country, following in the hilarious tradition of people in the media taking up the valuable time of people with more important jobs than theirs in order to provide all their media chums with evidence of how amazingly clever they are. Coming soon: the Little Book of Theatre Critics Throwing Bricks at Tradesmen.

The Little Book of Smug Parodies

An indispensable and uproarious spoof of last year's unfunny and overpriced book you received as a gift. Relies entirely on you being dumb enough to have read the original pisspoor book for you to get the joke. It's also twice the price.

The Little Book of Polemics

The complete guide to having an opinion during this festive period. Contains 101 reasons why other people's beliefs are wrong, including:

1. They're not white and middle class
2. They haven't had exactly the same experiences and dreams as you
3. They're not you

The Little Book of Wiping Your Arse

An indispensable guide to that wholesome activity we all have to practice from time to time. Packed with fascinating faecal facts, the modern man-about-toilet will never again fear being caught out by smears, clingers, nuggets, aftershocks, matting, tearing, chafing, chapping, wiping against the grain and missing entirely. The perfect preparation for a lunchbreak spent juggling a toilet roll in one hand and last year's unfunny and overpriced book in the other.

The Pseudo-Posh Little Book of Lists

Because saying things like "splendid" and "jolly good" is side-splittingly hilarious.

The Little Stocking Filler Book

You know that creepy weirdo in your life you bought a gift for several years ago, and now the bastard sends you something every year and you feel guilty about not returning the favour? Wondering what to buy him? Well, wonder no more! The book is a load of bollocks, but hey, that expensive price on the back looks good and the cute name flatters the recipient into thinking you give a damn about them. And if somebody is stupid enough to buy it for you, it is exactly the right size and weight to get biblical on their arses.

The Bible

The cash-in book of the brilliant website. Contains St Paul's Blog to the Corinthians and I'm A Celebrity – Exodus!

Black and White and Light and Shade

It is tempting to say that public reaction to contemporary art is improving, but perhaps nothing has changed except the newspaper articles that tell us this are no longer selling papers. Press coverage seems to have settled down in recent times, but we still get too many pictures of artists looking self-satisfied at the controversy they cause.

But most people never come into contact with modern art except as something that occasionally appears, unloved, in the high street and is immediately set upon by the local newspaper:

"We went out into the street and asked an 86 year old plumber what he thought of it. 'It's a load of rubbish!' he said, which is why we are asking the council to tear it down and burn it."

A weird situation often occurs here...you have a bunch of people desperate for the council to remove one small piece of art in a high street absolutely wrecked by ugly and excessive shop frontage, signage and badly-planned contemporary architecture. But these last few things are not easy targets; there's no instant plug-in "common-sense" argument to spit sneeringly from the lips based on a thousand tabloid articles.

The reason many people have views on contemporary art in the first place is a strange result of circular logic. A newspaper places each member of the public in a target market and identifies them as someone who hates modern art. So they place stories telling them how bad modern art is...hey presto, those members of the public read about it and start hating modern art. Hmm. I fear that the percentage of people with an opinion of the contents of Tate Modern who have actually been to this free admission museum is lower than a snake's belly.

We should, of course, not blame the media. Another easy target. There is certainly a great deal of bad art out there and much of it hides behind the breaking of taboos. The maxim that art should make you feel something is a good one, but when that feeling is always engineered to be a vague sense of shock, we are right to become weary over time. People's reactions to this art is based on their exposure to it, and if they have only ever been exposed to the stuff that is supposed to shock, that sense of ennui is understandable.

The public reaction is based on modern art being a single entity to celebrate or despise, as if it were some kind of blood-soaked, sex-obsessed celebrity wallowing in the spolight and swearing its head off. This becomes even clearer when you realise how people's arguments are frequently based on their feelings toward the artist, rather than the artwork. It is easier to comprehend this way, and ignores a bigger debate as to what makes good art over bad art, rather than the usual "Modern Art is Crap...yes or no?" Perhaps this year's winning Turner Prize entry, along with a great deal of positive coverage, will help us overcome this hurdle.

Rollin' Dice in the Landlord's Lair

I received the email I had been waiting for late on Sunday evening. Adam had already dangled the carrot in front of my face with a text saying that he had found the perfect flat to share…but this was the full monty, photographs and all. One telephone conversation later and it was a done deal. We will put the deposit down on the place sometime this week.

I haven't even seen the place for myself, but I am more than willing to write a cheque for some hideous amount of money. Why not? I trust his judgement and he describes the place as fulfilling every demand we have for a flat. I am willing to take a chance, even after doing the same thing at university and ending up with a terrible hovel where the back bedroom was damp and the furniture was fucked and the bathroom walls were mouldy. It was a rotten place and forty quid a week rent was easily too much. The On button on the vacuum cleaner had to be taped On. There were no windows in the lounge. The locks were so poor that somebody broke in one evening simply by levering one of the back windows. It should be noted that, such was the state of the place, we didn't even notice for a week. In the end the fact the bedroom doors had their own locks resulted in practically nothing being taken. The main thing I remember about the incident was that it took a hell of a badgering for the landlord to fit extra locks instead of simply replacing the old one.

We came back after the Easter break to find that, instead of a television, there were temporary traffic lights. This was not a good development and took the student cliché too far into the realms of the absurd. This, though, cannot be blamed on the house or the area, and is entirely Ben's fault. We shall gloss over it, as we will the shaving foam fight, the paddling pool that lasted precisely three days, and the terrible and unwarranted outbreaks of nudity.

But our problems were surmountable and we were too busy to care anyway. In that case we had no choice but to go for the cheapest and nastiest housing available, something around which I can sidestep this time. That kind of place works when you are perpetually drunk, stoned or in love, and you don't care how much beer the carpets drink, how filthy the cooker gets and how pisspoor the posters on the wall really are…

But how long will this be the case? Students are presently the children of the eighties and have grown into a media-oriented world where image is paramount and higher education is a rich man's game. Will your average 19 year old with Strokes hair and two hundred pound ill-fitting jeans slum it in the future? Or will they all be locked away in nice, expensive student accommodation, as is increasingly the case? If there is one thing I took away from my university is that the average undergraduate is now completely faceless, an open wallet to these people. They are happy to build new accommodation because they can charge huge fees for the students and even bigger fees for corporate guests during university holidays.

Let us take one example from many. In my final year I returned to living in halls of residence. When I went back for the summer term at university my entire hall had been repainted the day before, and the place was virtually uninhabitable. They had been painted so late because otherwise it would have affected the amount of corporate guests they could have squeezed in. Sure, we could have been spared a week or so of headaches and dizziness if they had painted the halls earlier, but what's a few people falling down sick and missing exam preparation when there are corporate bank accounts to be milked? The greed of my university was, and is, legendary in the circles of higher education. And every so often they call me up to shake me down for more money. Balls to them. They are parasites. I owe them nothing. (The loans company is, of course, another matter.)

Ah…I appear to have wandered somewhat. I was talking about moving into a house I have not yet visited. But what the hell, anyway…I have already investigated the area in which I will soon be living, and I know what the inside of the average house there looks like.

If our path is as smooth as it has been so far, then we will be moving in at the beginning of January. This gives me three weeks off between finishing my current job and moving down to London, and I intend to make the most of it. Put simply, if I end up being able to remember the next few weeks, I will have failed.

Someone's Going to Pay For This

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."
-- Alfred Hitchcock

Tony Blair is pacing the floor this morning and wishing that many things in his life would just go away… Black Watch are coming home and there is uncomfortable talk of casualty rates, disbanding the unit, and also the continuing violence in Iraq, now focused chiefly on Iraqis who co-operate with the Americans. Talk of his cheerful rival Gordon Brown continues to browbeat him…even Neil Kinnock is backing the chancellor, although how much weight he carried in these times is debatable; his Europhile stance frightens many in this country, and anybody who saw his abysmal performance chairing Have I Got News For You in Friday has yet to scrape their jaw off the floor.

But the main reason why the No. 10 carpet is being worn to the underlay is David Blunkett. Blair is fretting over how much he should back his wayward minister, knowing that his situation is balanced between the inevitable whitewash of the official enquiry and whatever the papers can dig up. Some people are suggesting that the fact that Blunkett was so quick to address these allegations was a masterstroke in controlling his environment. He fenced off these problems and addressed them immediately, which meant he could ensure that any skeletons dancing around in cupboards outside the fence would never be noticed. So long as he severed any possible connection between the known allegations and the unknown potential ones, he would be able to take this whole bad situation as a flesh wound from which he would recover well in time for the election.

And as soon as he clears this lot up he will be on the attack; he will straighten his tie and harden his heart. He will unscrew his hand, toss it into the waste bin, and screw on an iron fist in its place. Drums will sound. The piano in the corner of the saloon will cease. And there will be fireworks. Another army of straw men for him to crush. Another massive dose of the Fear for us all, and any talk of any future affairs will be classed as terrorism…we will all be clapped in manacles for this, the press will be castrated, and we will be begging for identity cards. If we don't, we will be carried off in the night and have our buttocks calved into slices, to be garnished with the liver of demonstrators, the intestines of activists, and the hearts of everyone with a heart. He will not use our brains, though; they left on the first spaceship off the planet when I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here began its most recent run.

Hmm…now the Tories have brushed themselves off and started calling for David Blunkett's resignation. Which means they now know that he will be staying… If the dam was truly about to burst, washing away Blunkett's front bench career like a straw hut on the valley floor, they would not be so vocal. Opposition parties do not force resignations…no, they happen when events are badly contained by the perpetrator's army of dark-hearted aides.

Ah, but the results are still not in and there could be a nasty surprise lurking in wait…with the newspapers in baleful humour, all they need to do is to catch him in one big lie for them to cite the Boris Johnson precedent; that is, shag around all you like, just don't lie to the faithful. That is what maketh the man in modern parliament. Our ministers used to live and die by the simple maxim "don't get caught". Now this has become irrelevant. Strange times indeed.

In the meantime, Blair continues to pace and wonder who will be next. If he is anything like the man we have come to expect, that person will be You and Me.

Hey Hey Hey Hey…

"These are the days of the dangerous rays
These are the days that matter"
-- John Cooper Clarke

Right. But there is little chance of any dangerous rays today. Not on a winter's morning on the slide towards Christmas. But the sunrise was magnificent; an ominous and expansive explosion of gloomy yellow and shocking pink. At the other side of the sky a rainbow sat and watched with a vague sense of redundancy. It occurred to me as I headed to the shops that if you saw pictures or films of the scene before me, you would at once yearn to be there, to bask in the atmosphere and feel strange thoughts of romance and lament.

Balls. It was freezing, and half an hour later it began to rain. I felt more than a little weird. The sounds of the street were coming to my ears filtered through a fog of yesterday's Fall gig. Hmm…I hadn't been to see any live music since The Orb back in May, so I wasn't prepared for the sheer volume last night…now even the sound of my keyboard is piercing and unwordly, and from another office a weird recital of Slade's famous Christmas hit sounds like a banshee being tortured in some far-off dimension. (Although I suspect that may be just Ian's singing)

We got to the Boardwalk last night minutes before John Cooper Clarke began his support slot. I headed for the bar and cursed…I realised that I had no money. Shit. This was bad…all around me the crowd of ageing men and nervous students were losing themselves in a blizzard of beer, fags and joints. Their path was righteous and I needed to follow them.

"You're buying," I said to my companion, who shrugged.

"What the hell?" he said. "It's nearly Christmas, and we're about to see The Fall. Why argue about money?"

Well…maybe. His actual words may have involved more swearing and less festive cheer, but let us not concern ourselves with detail.

We muscled our way to somewhere near the front as John Cooper Clarke came on, his black hair bursting out in every direction and his red glasses hiding mischievous eyes. Wild applause and strange anticipation. He grabbed the mike with one hand and his fags in the other.

"What's you name?" he said.

"Jack," said the man in the audience.

"Hi Jack. Got any crack?"

And he was off. The crowd were receptive and in great humour as he rattled through a relaxed and wry mixture of punk poetry, FHM-style jokes and half-crazed observations – he spent five minutes on one riff about why a shop called Friar Tuck's World of Miniatures could have possibly gone out of business. It was crazy and twisted and made everyone stupidly happy.

"John! Write a poem about Mark E Smith!" somebody shouted near the end.

"Don't be stupid. I want to live! I have a rule…never write poems about people you see on a regular basis…"

He finished with a haiku and came back for an encore before leaving the way for the mighty Fall. I exchanged glances with my companion and we began to lay bets on how late they would come on. At the time it was before ten.

"Okay… I suspect it'll end up being at least half past, but I'm in a confident mood and I'll lay money on quarter past."

"What money?"

"Oh, balls."

On the stroke of half past they came on. The current line-up is very strong and confident with the material, and this year Mark E Smith was in apparent good humour. Much of the time he stood imperiously at the front and surveyed the crowd with an austere eye as he played with the microphones. It was a breathless performance with no time to rest up…he never once broke stride, even when he was casting bad mikes to the floor, kicking mike stands across the stage or pissing about with the levels somewhere out of view. Damn it, he even cracked a smile during Mr. Pharmacist.

Hmm..I am terrible with song titles…I recognised almost all the songs last night but I only know a few of the titles. So I can't relate any kind of set list, or even the information as to who the hell it was who joined Mark on vocals singing "Open the box!" during Boxoctosis. But to hell with it…the night was an explosion and I don't need to get into the details of how the dynamite was laid.

Last year at the Boardwalk Mark dragged the band off stage after two minutes for reasons we could only speculate on ("He doesn't like people staring at him…", "The levels are wrong", "He's a grumpy fucker" etc etc), and once back on he stalked the stage and stared at the wall and crouched out of site, barely noticing the crowd of adoring bastards pogoing, waving lighters and closing their eyes in reverie. But here's the thing…the music was still fantasic. The band was as strong as this year and Mark's snarled vocals seem entirely unaffected by his mood.

But was something special about this year, with Mark in fine form and willing to face his audience with a swagger and a growl. He's a man who has felt the fire and refuses to give up or give ground…and when he comes back next year, hopefully with a handful of new songs, I know that I will be there.

Stock Phrase Market Update #2

Share price equals the number of results from the Google News (UK) search box given by each phrase. Phrases entered in quotation marks. Changes in prices shown reflect the previous seven days. High and Low prices based on daily results.

Raft of Measures: ..83.. (-14, Hi 99, Lo 81)
So To Speak: ..1910.. (+140, Hi 1910, Lo 1740)
The Holy Grail: ..839.. (+136, Hi 839, Lo 713)
The New Black: ..145.. (+1, Hi 150, Lo 135)
The Rest is History: ..334.. (0, Hi 341, Lo 298)
Will Never Be The Same Again: ..89.. (+7, Hi 89, Lo 82)

Friday 26th November was a rich day indeed for the wise investor; our shares went up across the board. Even The Holy Grail rallied to 781 after dropping 4% on Thursday. So To Speak rose by 60 points (3.4%) to 1830, but the big winner was Will Never Be The Same Again, which rose a mammoth 7.3% to 88. For part of this we must thank Jonny Wilkinson for breaking his arm – the permanent nerve damage he sustained was easily worth it to feed our hungry portfolio with news stories. But the hunt for the letter H in his name continues.

The magic soon turned to dust. This weekend ripped huge chunks out of the portfolio… and even the stories on Friday about the actual Holy Grail -- rather than the phrase used as a metaphor -- didn't stop prices falling to their lowest levels so far. But this appears to be the nature of Google News…with fewer newspapers publishing and updating over the weekend, this will have a negative effect on number of results. So as the week progressed, prices began to climb once more, with only Raft of Measures failing to rally now that the Queen's speech is long over.

Hell in a Hand Cart has now fallen off the stock phrase market, possibly into somebody's coffee.

The Old Ghosts Are Restless

The news today had a familiar ring about it and it took me a while to realise why. History is made up of repeating patterns, and for some reason a good many of these repetitions have swung back round on us all at once. Even a cursory flick around the news would bring up stories of how drinking is Bad For You, an annual story we always get to hear in the run up to Christmas. But there are other patterns, and some are darker than others.

Hmm...it feels like I have done nothing but brood on the news all week, yet I am struggling to find a reason to continue following some of these low rent stories. The bigger picture is unchanging...the winners will continue to be the ones with the most financial backing; and even when the underdogs bang in a unexpected goal to draw level, we know it is only a small bone to chew on, an illusion to delude us into thinking we're going places. But what the hell. Let us spend a few minutes wallowing in the cheaper dives.

In Ottawa, somewhere between 5,000 and 13,000 people were marching against Bush, focusing angrily on Bush's role as "war criminal". So…a march against Bush? Must be a Wednesday. He was there to build bridges with Canada that have lied in smouldering ruins since the war, and the reaction was not good…some might even say, based on the fact that Canada has some cold weather, that it was chilly. "Bush gets a chilly reception" – newsday.com. "Canadians give cool reception to President Bush" – Seattle Times. "Bush's visit to Canada chilly" – AZ Central.com.

Whilst in Ottawa he took part in a press conference with Prime Minister Paul Martin, in which he spoke about the Ukraine situation. In Ukraine the shadow of a strange election still falls over the country and chills the bones of all who linger in its darkness. After 10 days of the crisis, demonstrators still line the streets and mediators are being brought in to throw some more words about. World leaders are watching nervously and thinking one unpleasant thought...that if some leering bunch of rebellious yahoos can force their masters to re-run this election, this would set a dangerous precedent across the globe, and a thousand hands in a thousand pockets will cling that bit tighter to their brown paper envelope full of cash.

Meanwhile, ghosts of the VHS / Betamax format war are rising as the next generation DVD formats from Sony and Toshiba begin their struggle to gain acceptance. The smart money at the moment is on Toshiba's HD-DVD format, which yesterday gained backing from four Hollywood studios.

Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file sharing software, is on trial, echoing the Napster trial of 2000. Already the arguments are flying, both in court and across the Internet. "[Kazaa is] an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen" claimed the record industry. Remember that this is an industry who, in the UK, have managed the impressive feat of condemning internet piracy for decimating record sales whilst simultaneously announcing, er, record album sales. Kazaa owners Sharman Networks have already begun their defence, much of which is centred around the fact they are powerless to stop the file-sharing abuses of their perfectly legal system. Fair enough…it would be like censuring BT for allowing criminals to plot foul deeds over the telephone.

Indeed, but if BT were to set up a specialised criminal phone system -- perhaps with a kind of Friends and Family discount for those with Mafia connections – then there would be a case against them the size of Wales.

No. This shouldn't centre around whether Kazaa should be accountable for the deeds of file sharers, good or bad, but on how the industry is going to adapt to the situation as a whole. The horse has now bolted, and the record industry are ploughing millions into shutting the stable door, thinking that if they can just get that pesky door closed they will be once again in control and able to iron-fist consumers and artists alike. Just remember…whenever a major record label works itself into a righteous froth over file-sharing, what are they fighting over? Music? Creative integrity? The right for musicians to get paid? Or is it perhaps another fleet of speedboats with which to impress their mistresses… So fuck 'em. It's the only language they understand.