Hetty and Pixie

Leafing through an old issue of Computer Active, the only computer magazine that I have a hope of understanding, I came across an article recommending 50 useful websites. The article might still be there, although I can’t find it easily myself.

A lot of them I’d already found for myself. Cinema sites such as IMDb; a pub guide; cricket; Google Earth; Delia Smith on food; etc, etc.

* * *

But one site I would never have thought to seek out is Cat of the Day.

It’s twee, it’s cute, it’s what it says on the tin: a daily picture of someone’s moggy. But cats are not cute. They are the tiger in your living room.

Over the last twenty years two of the creatures have added my home to their territory.

HETTY was the first. Hetty, because we didn’t realise at first that he was a tom. We never had him neutered, or castrated as I prefer to call it. There were various reasons for this anti-social omission.

First, he was a fine cat and deserved to have his genes preserved. Second, the tabby cat in general is in danger, with people wanting to show off their wealth with pedigrees and other designer cats. In any case, it’s the female’s job to worry about contraception, isn’t it? (Only joking). Third, as a fellow male, I felt a kinship with him and couldn’t bear the thought of mutilating him in that horrendous way. I did consider a vasectomy for him, after he’d had a busy year or two impregnating the local queens, but that brought me up against the fourth reason: sheer bloody stinginess.

I did have to take him to the vet once. Playing cricket with one of my children in the back garden, I tossed the ball towards the bat, and as the child swung to hit it, Hetty appeared out of nowhere to try and catch the ball.

He was laid out cold and remained so for an hour or two.

The vet hummed and haahed, prescribed some tablets and suggested tests. By the time of the test results, three days later, by which time Hetty was bounding around like a kitten, the vet informed us there was nothing wrong and presented a large bill.

Hetty would be away for days on end, and we learned not to worry, but then came the time when we knew he would never return. Perhaps he had hopped onto a lorry that was often parked nearby and ended up in Grimsby. Perhaps that neighbour had carried out his threat to shoot him if he trespassed on his garden again. Perhaps he found a better place to stay.

For he never belonged to us. And that’s why I loved him.

* * *

PIXIE, who replaced Hetty, was a female. Like Hetty she was black and white, and beautiful. (The pictured cat is very like her).

I always assumed it was a sexual thing that Hetty took to my wife more than me, but with Pixie mine was her lap of preference. Every day, when I returned home from work, she would be waiting for me and as I pulled the car into the drive she would trot towards it in greeting. But when I got out of the car and walked towards her she would turn her back and ignore me. At all costs she must remain cool and keep her distance. Our relationship was strictly on her terms.

Two things I found she had difficulty in resisting. Being groomed with a comb. I envied the sensual pleasure she seemed to derive from the stroke of the comb under her chin. The other was marmite. I discovered that the greatest treat for her was licking a dollop of the spread from the tip of my finger. So rough was her tongue that my finger was left totally unsticky. A genuinely shared pleasure.

Desmond Morris once called a domestic cat ‘the tiger in your living room’, and he was quite right. The last time I saw a tiger, in a zoo, I was struck by the way it walked or rather slunk along, head down but wary, ears flicking, hind quarters low-slung and ready to pounce.

Pixie always hunted. I used to watch her in the back garden, sitting under a buddleia eyeing the butterflies and occasionally grabbing one out of the air. I’ve seen her stalking through flowers and emerging with something furry in her teeth, a tail dangling from her mouth. Once she took this victim and placed in what I would swear was the geometric centre of the lawn and lay it down. Then she moved several yards away and watched. The prey – vole, shrew – scuttled towards the safety of the bushes. But in vain, because Pixie would wait until it was inches from shelter before bounding over and catching it. The process began again. Eventually, either through boredom or as a reward for passing her own test, she ate it.

Let’s not apply anthropomorphic sentimentality to a wild animal. Let’s admire the perfection of its predatory instincts and skill.


PIXIE’S KITTENS were born in the middle of the night on my daughter’s bed. One fell to the floor and it was its scream for help – a scream so shrill and piercing that it was difficult to believe so tiny a creature could utter it – that woke me. I picked it up and placed it with the others, which were already suckling.

I believe I saved that little cat’s life. So much for not interfering with nature!

While the four kittens were chasing balls of rolled up newspaper, fighting with each other and flattening the flowerbeds, Pixie was driven to a hunting frenzy. At least once a day we would hear her summoning yowl at the kitchen window and she leapt in with some dead creature. There followed a scramble for the prize, and I noticed that the kitten I prided myself for saving usually missed out. He remained the runt, even in a small litter of four.

I’d found homes for them all, but heard that I should wait twelve weeks before parting them from their mother. I needn’t have been told, because Pixie knew. For at that time, to the day, she rejected them. She was lying on the floor, and when the kittens approached to nuzzle at her belly she snarled and spat and clawed them away. They sat back, expressions of shock on their faces – or was that me transferring my own reaction to them? But if cats can shrug their shoulders that’s what they did next.

A few days later they departed for their new homes.

Pixie is old now, bad-tempered and weak, but she still enjoys being groomed and still has her own personal jar of Marmite. She may have grown old but she retains the desire for certain pleasures. I know how she feels.

'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins

[1]

Just after finishing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I happened to watch Elmer Gantry again.

It’s Burt Lancaster’s film, and he plays the role he was born for, but I’ll forbear lyricising about Burt and mention just one scene. This is where Arthur Kennedy, playing once again his cynical, sceptical but decent reporter character, has written an article condemning the hysteria and charlatanism endemic in ‘revivalism’.

In order to get the newspaper to print a retraction and make space available for a rebuttal, Elmer Gantry cross-examines the journalist about his religious beliefs. Kennedy’s character wheedles and prevaricates. He talks about the Bible being ‘beautiful poetry’; he admits how much he would like to believe. To confess to atheism, at that time, in America, was almost unthinkable.

And even today, we are browbeaten into showing respect for religion. On a radio show recently I heard Robert Winston, who professes Judaism, criticising Dawkins for his insulting use of the word ‘delusion’ in the title of this book. As I listened to him, I thought of the line, ‘Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.’

How could this intelligent man, I thought, not just believe, effectively, that there are fairies at the bottom of his garden, but expect other intelligent people to respect that belief? That delusion. That dangerous, dehumanising delusion.

Why is it that we are so careful in this country to understand and placate Muslims? Is it just that we afraid of being murdered? Maybe. But then why are we so concerned with a possibly diseased bullock, considered ‘sacred’ by a bunch of Hindus, who howl with outrage at the sacrilege committed by officials entering a ‘holy shrine’ to cart the damned thing off for slaughter. The man in charge actually took his boots off before entering. Can you believe it?

Can you believe that the case actually got to the Court of Appeal? I doubt if my cat would get the same consideration.

[2]

Dawkins gets the respect thing out of the way early and moves on to ask what people mean when they talk about belief in ‘God’. It’s what I always ask when someone asks me whether I believe in God. Which God? Allah, Jehovah, Pan, Thor? Aphrodite? Maybe I’d get down on my knees for her.

What sort of ‘god’? The clockmaker, the personal interventionist, the omnipresent immanence?

He checks off all the so-called proofs of some sort of god’s existence and easily shows how spurious they all are, before attempting to make some sort of case for the non-existence of God. Proving a negative is not easy at the best of times. So why bother trying, especially when not only is there no evidence for the positive, but we don’t know the nature of that ‘positive’, and it’s of no practical relevance to us anyway?

The answer to that is that the power of theism and its attendant religion is at best a dilution of our greatest talent, namely our reason; and at worst it is a seedbed for fanaticism, obscurantism and murder.

[3]

Dawkins seems to share this view, because not content with making an intellectual case for rejecting theism and embracing atheism, he goes onto the offensive. And he’s quite right to do so. Theists and religionists have had it their own way far too long, with their demands for respect, their indoctrination of children and their all-round bullying.

It’s timely too, when you can’t open a newspaper without seeing the stranglehold of militant Protestants on US politics, murderously militant Islam and the pernicious influence of Catholicism in the Third World.

Dawkins tries to explain the existence of religion in evolutionary terms, as a by-product of some useful mutation, primarily the tendency of children to believe their parents, to whom they are attached for a substantial part of their life. Add to that our inclination to form groups and avoid isolation, and the necessity for some emotional basis for pair-bonding, and it’s not fanciful to see by-products in nationalism, tribalism, religious affiliation (and fanatical support for football teams).

Religion gives us answers, something the human animal yearns for. And it gives us power. Every parent likes to invoke an authority figure to reinforce their own attempts at discipline. For example, ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ or ‘Don’t let that policeman see you.’ God is the best bogeyman you think of.

An issue Dawkins doesn’t address is whether humans have come to a point where evolution is not working any longer, because we are able to interfere with it. Our social morality forbids us, for example, to let the weak die; it also prevents males from distributing their seed as widely as they are programmed to do. At least it tries to.

Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that evolution is a hit-and-miss operation. For every useful mutation or trait-elimination there must be millions of useless or threatening ones. Such as religiosity.

[4]

While Dawkins’ polemic against religion is timely and necessary, he is less than politic in singling out certain moral issues with which to attack it. Abortion, for example. An attack on religion because it often forbids abortion is unlikely to be effective with people like myself who are uneasy about the wholesale termination of pregnancies. My concern has nothing to do with religion. I could argue that we are not giving evolution a chance, when healthy intelligent parents destroy their own genes.

Religion’s frequent prejudice against homosexuality is another of Dawkins’ bêtes noires. While tolerant myself I can easily understand a dislike of the practice in purely non-religious terms. After all, are not homosexuals, like nuns and monks, an evolutionary dead-end?

[5]

I have to say that I found a lot of Dawkins’ scientific explanations difficult to follow. But his final chapter, where he tries to describe the wonder of a mysterious world and the joy of forever discovering more about it without benefit of easy ‘revealed’ explanations, is inspirational.

His book is dedicated to Douglas Adams, with this quotation:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Recently Read Novels

I heard an interview with Gervaise Finn the other day. Finn is the former teacher and schools inspector who writes cosily humorous anecdotes about his work in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s like All Creatures Great and Small, with kids instead of cows.

In the interview, where Finn was discussing some of his favourite books, he made the point that he tended to read as a writer. He would be aware of the technical devices, the style adopted, the choice of words, the pacing, etc.

I’m no writer, but I find myself doing the same thing. It reminds me of how, many years ago, when reading for a literary degree, I would write ‘literary appreciations’ as an academic exercise, usually on a piece of verse – Subject, Theme, Content, Style was the usual framework. It was all a bit dry. I sometimes think that a poem demands an emotional response and, if you are able to do a good job of conveying that response in writing, there is little point in the poem in the first place.

That’s not entirely true, obviously. After all, a good artist needs a sound knowledge of anatomy. But it irritates me when all a critic can do is point out allusions, interesting rhyme schemes and the like. It’s rather like watching O, Brother, Where Art Thou? with someone who insists on telling you all the parallels with The Odyssey. (That someone, by the way, could easily be me, I have to confess).

I was moved to muse on these matters because I’ve just completed several very different books.

Augustus, by John Williams, a novel which I’ve mentioned before, is the story of the first Emperor of Rome told by means of letters, diary entries, military reports, official proclamations, etc. Thus it provides a multiplicity of points of view, similar to the letter-novels of the novel’s infancy. It does not attempt therefore to pronounce an overall objective judgment on the central character. Such a judgment would merely be that of the author in any case and the multi-viewpoint approach offers greater truth if less certainty.

The Killer Within Me by Jim Thompson is also written in the first person, that person being criminally insane. While Williams' style is impressionistic, Thompson’s, typically of that American genre of ‘roman noir’, is expressionistic. It’s direct, crude and slangy. Sentences are short and punctuation is peppered with dashes, ellipses, capitalisation. Lot’s of dialogue.

Raymond Chandler always praised Jim Thompson as the master. So did Stanley Kubrick, for whom he wrote the screenplays of The Killing and Paths of Glory. Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway was based on a Thompson novel.

It is the custom to say that a movie is not as good as the novel upon which it is based. Not always true, by any means. The Guns of Navarone, for example, which I have just re-read. I know the film well, having seen it at an impressionable age – I still write my ‘e’s’ in the pseudo-Greek way (rather like this: <- ) used in the credits. Alastair MacLean obviously strives to write well, trying hard to describe and depict the storms, the scenery and even a little psychology. But he’s constrained by his formula. Every member of the team is an expert, able to demonstrate superhuman skills and perform uncommon feats of endurance. MacLean’s attempts at ‘literature’, if anything slow the book down, unlike the film, which never lets up the pace in all its two-plus hours. The film also redrew the characters, partly to flesh them out and tailor them to the all-star cast. It also created extra dimensions to provide more internal tension. And a couple of women to add a little sexual interest. A book of MacLean’s that I plan to read is what I think was his first, HMS Ulysses, which some consider to be one of the best books on the naval theatre of World War II, along with The Cruel Sea and The Caine Mutiny.

In the meantime I’m reading The Good Shepherd by C S Forester, whose books I’ve loved since I discovered Hornblower in my teens. Forester also wrote The African Queen, The Gun (which became The Pride and the Passion – now that was one where the film didn’t do justice to the book - and Brown on Resolution, which became Single-handed or Sailor of the King or Born for Glory or Forever England, take your pick. Take your pick of endings too.

The Good Shepherd is the story of a day in the life of the commander of a convoy escort at the height of the War in the Atlantic. In minute, methodical detail we follow the cat-and-mouse struggle between a destroyer and a wolf-pack of U-boats.

A brave book in many ways, for many would find it boring, despite the tension, for it is repetitive and action is minimal. I’m finding it fascinating.

A range of authors, a range of styles. Good or bad I admire them all, because writing is difficult. I know, I try to do it everyday, and am conscious of my inability to measure up to my own expectations, let alone the quality I see in others.

I’ve tried to compose poems and songs; I’ve attempted humour, irony and polemic in essays and letters; I keep a diary, I write my blog and snatches of autobiography; I’ve turned my hand to fiction, short stories worthy of women’s magazines and some fit only for the top shelf. But.

But I miss out on the elegance and insight of John Williams, the unself-consciousness of Thompson, the plotting and personal experience of MacLean, the knowledge of Forester, the warmth of Finn – not to mention other favourite authors. Wilde’s wit, Alastair Cooke’s conversational and discursive style – the list is endless. And intimidating.

But, as Churchill would say – he’s another one – KBO.

Sorry to be so boring

IT IS PETTY and perverse of me, I admit, to look around my local pub and observe with complacent satisfaction the empty chairs, the bored staff, and the increasingly desperate special offers.

I read in the local press that pub trade has reduced by 10 per cent since the smoking ban and backstreet boozers with no opportunity to provide outside facilities are facing a harsh commercial winter.

I got up from my table the other day, where there was a smug conversation going on about the administrative cock-up that is ‘Smoke-on-Trent’ to order another drink. I noticed a sign on the bar offering a steak at half price. ‘Vegetables of your choice,’ it promised. ‘Just ask our friendly staff.’

‘Are you one of the friendly ones?’ I asked Molly, the barmaid. ‘I’m never quite sure?’

‘What?’

‘Well, it says here, ‘’Ask our friendly staff.’’ I don’t want to ask any one unfriendly by mistake.’

She expressed doubts about my grip on reality and advised me to absent myself forthwith. Except she didn’t bother with the circumlocution.

Now that’s the thing about the English language. It’s so gloriously imprecise in some ways. In other ways it’s quite the opposite, because it’s got twice the number of words as, say, German. It’s a great mongrel of a language – and my father always told me to avoid pedigree dogs – unlike French, which even has an Academy to maintain its incestuous decline.

But French can’t be accused of being imprecise. I wouldn’t have been able to make my joking remark about ‘friendly staff’ in that language. Because French allows you to put an adjective before or after a noun, depending on the sense. Take ‘green grass’, for example. If you want to distinguish the green grass from grass of another colour, you would place ‘verte’ after ‘l’herbe’. If on the other hand you were just using green as a standard description of grass – all grass is by default green – it would go in front. This was the purpose of ‘friendly staff’, I presume.

I LEFT MY PINT on the table and strolled along the outside of the pub, to smoke a cigarette. I paused to light it and realised I was by an open window. What, I thought, if my smoke were to waft inside the pub? Would that count as ‘smoking inside a confined public space’? This thought took me back to my Latin lessons. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

I had to ask myself if ‘confined space’ is in the ablative case or the accusative. If the former, ‘smoking in the pub’ would have the sense of ‘inside the pub’. If, on the other hand, ‘in’ is followed by the accusative case of the noun, it would mean ‘into the pub’. I would therefore be on the wrong side of the law (except in Stoke, that is).

Surprisingly, for such a language as English, flexible if you like, vague if you prefer, people will insist on being pedantic about it. Lynne Truss famously, and very profitably, wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a combination of diatribe against poor punctuation and manual of correct practice.

Interestingly, if the New York Times is typical, the Americans were not impressed. This article not only disagrees with her rules of punctuation, but criticises her prose style, her grammar and her syntax.

I REMEMBER the fuss when the Ministry of Transport had a campaign about the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel of the car. ‘Don’t Drive Tired’ was the slogan.

‘Tired’ is an adjective. A verb must be modified by an adverb, must it not? What kind of message does it send when a government department propagates bad English? Etc . . . etc..

The criticism was misplaced, of course. The slogan may not be very elegant, but it’s more elegant, and certainly more effective, than ‘Don’t Drive Tiredly’, or ‘Don’t Drive While Fatigued’.

If I wanted to get into syntactic analysis, I could prove that the adjective, ‘tired’, is qualifying the understood ‘you’, part of the understood phrase, ‘while you are’. And in any case, if Dylan Thomas could write ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, why can’t we say ‘Don’t drive tired’?

(Should that question mark come before the quotation mark, I wonder? After all, Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma.)

The imprecision of English leads to inadvertent humour – ‘I see chickens are going cheap in Asda;’ bawdy humour – ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to introduce me to your wife;’ and poetry – ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking to his hands.’ Is any other language so prone to punning?

A LITTLE LATER, once again outside indulging the pleasures of the flesh, I stopped to read the notice warning against smoking in the pub. What a contemptible little scrap of card, and what execrable English. What a perfect feast for lawyers, so perfect an example of imprecise English it is.

‘These are no smoking premises. It is an offence to smoke or knowingly to permit smoking in these premises.

‘If you observe someone smoking here, a complaint may be made to the manager.’

‘These are no smoking premises.’ That could mean that ‘these premises don’t smoke.’ And if you’re not going to say ‘NON- smoking premises’, shouldn’t you at least put the hyphen after ‘no’.

‘Knowingly to permit . . .’ Well, at least the writer didn’t split the infinitive. But does this mean that other customers are obliged by law to prevent smoking? Are citizen’s arrests permitted?

‘A complaint may be made.’ Does this mean that there is a possibility of complaint or that you have permission to complain? Or could it mean that a complaint may be made about you observing smoking?

You see what nicotine deprivation does to people.

And if you’ve reached the end of this blog, you’re a sadder man that I am.

Augustus (1972) by John Williams

My Google alert for ‘sonnet’ referred me to an article on John Williams, an American novelist of whom I had not previously heard.

He died in 1994, having completed a small body of work, novels that appear to be very different one from the other, at least superficially.

One of these was Augustus (1972), an epistolary-type novel about the first Roman emperor. The man is described by his contemporaries, friends, enemies and observers, in letters, diaries and official documents. It is technically accomplished, elegant in style and penetrating in its psychology, which cannot avoid being ‘modern’ and all the more interesting for that.

Augustus finally speaks for himself, as an old man, in a long last chapter, from which this excerpt particularly struck me today:

‘The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.

The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal.

But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself.’

7-7-7

Today is the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the millennium. Cue troops of ‘numerologists’ spouting their nonsense in the media. It wouldn’t be that date, naturally, if we were still on the Julian calendar or if we were following Muslim or Jewish dates.

Nonetheless it sparks a little interest when an acquaintance of mine tells me that today is his 77th birthday.

Yesterday, Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Lib Dems, was warned by police for smoking on a train. The council’s non-smoking signs at the entrance to my block of flats have mysteriously fallen off.

I hear Heathrow airport has a baggage backlog. In order to clear it, according to the BBC, ‘volunteers have been drafted in.’ Interesting phrase.

I heard two women talking about the weather yesterday. After one had finished complaining about the rain, the other said, ‘Well, thank God, I’m getting away from it all next week. I’m going on holiday.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Wales.’

Die Hard 4.0

Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard)

2007. Directed by Len Wiseman. Starring Bruce Willis, Timothy Olyphant, Justin Long.

Has John Maclane given up smoking? His language certainly seems to have improved. All in the interests of gaining a more general censorship certificate.

I have no doubt that for a long time I shall be boring my numerically challenged readership to death with my complaints about the smoking ban. I believe the more positive term is ‘the creation of smoke-free areas’. As I say, the smoking ban.

Despite the weather and Wimbledon, it seems to be the only topic of conversation at bus queues and in the pub. Smokers moaning and ranting, non-smokers crowing, apart from the ones who try to be ‘reasonable’, no doubt realising there are more threats to their health than smoking.

I was reprimanded for smoking in the pub yesterday. I quite innocently lit up while reading the paper and it was when I was looking round for an ashtray that the manager pointed out my misdemeanour. My companions, of course, had said never a word, just looked on with amusement and waited to see what happened.

I went to see Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard) yesterday. It’s a good thing Bruce didn’t need his lighter to set off a petrol trail to take a plane out of the sky. In this film, instead, he takes out a helicopter and an F35 by much more elaborate means.

And that’s one of the differences between this latest episode and the early ones. The stunts are more spectacular and very obviously CGI’d and therefore less believable. Now, I’m not saying that Die Hard I and II were models of realism. But you could just about buy the heroic exploits and hair-raising escapes, especially since the whole thing was acted, edited and shot to keep you hooked.

The first two used the formula of a fixed, confined location, admittedly a big one. DH III and IV go on the road. In this one, we seem to go over the whole eastern seaboard, as if by teletransportation.

Maybe the thought is that the central character is what made the earlier film work so well. The tough, dogged, self-deprecating, inventive everyman with whom we can just about identify. Now he’s superman without the underpants. That’s why, I suppose, Bruce has to deliver a self-pitying speech about the downside of being a hero.

And we have to believe in DH IV that there are computer geeks out there whose skills are also superhuman. Is that reflecting the prevailing paranoia? Or am I just ignorant and complacent?

It seems very difficult to kill people in this movie, even the minor villains, who are incredibly skilled in kung fu and acrobatics. But when it comes to the deaths of innocent civilians, the film cheats a bit. Hundreds of cars are totalled, but we are spared the human tragedy. In DH II the plane crash engineered by the villain is preceded by scenes with the passengers which serve to humanise the tragedy.

As in DH III Maclane is provided with a partner, another departure from the original formula. Again, it weakens the central character. Part of his charm, if that’s the right word, is his technophobia and his down-to-earth physical approach to the overwhelming sophistication of his opponents. Here he needs the computer expertise of his nerdy companion. I know it’s necessary for the plot, but in that case it’s the wrong plot.

But it was a lot of fun.

Richard III

THE LAST TWO EVENINGS in the pub have been morgue-like. Not just because an oppressive atmosphere of gloom has replaced the pall of tobacco smoke, but because the place is bloody empty.

I take a perverse pleasure in that, although I am surprised that so many people have carried out their threat to buy in their beer and stay at home. The reason I don’t stay away myself is that I don’t want to deny myself the company of people I’ve come to know well and the opportunity to meet others.

We all have our own ways of not allowing the bastards to grind us down. I’ve found a decent place to sit next to the door onto the smoking patio. So it could be worse. What really gets my goat is overhearing these sanctimonious bastards saying how nice it is without the smoke, before ordering a veggie burger and a hot chocolate. I’ve found that you can irritate them by dangling an unlit cigarette from your mouth and occasionally flicking on your lighter. They then feel the need to keep an eye on you in case a complaint needs to be registered.

Of course it’s petty.

Perhaps all the absenteeism from pubs will lead to a revival of family life, albeit a smoky one. No doubt that will be the next target.

IT'S A LONG TIME since I heard the phrase ‘party piece’. I suppose it went out with family gatherings round the piano.

Once upon a time my own part piece was a recitation of Albert and the Lion, complete with accent that was somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire. I would have preferred to do Sam’s Medal, but performing that correctly requires half a dozen different articles of headgear, and I never quite bothered to acquire them.

I never quite had the courage to sing, but once I was persuaded to duet the song The Ballad of Bethnal Green.

NOWADAYS I would want to declaim a speech from Shakespeare. Maybe a sonnet, if I want to demonstrate that underneath I am a sensitive romantic, but preferably Richard III’s opening speech, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’ It’s difficult to avoid attempting a Laurence Olivier impersonation, but the great thing about learning a speech or a poem is that you get to know and understand it more and begin to endow it with you own interpretation, even relating it to your own personality and experience.

The speech had four sections, of which the fourth is simple exposition of the plot and sets the action in motion. I’m not bothering to learn that.

In the first section Richard muses on the peace which has descended on England following what appears to be his brother’s decisive victory in the Wars of the Roses.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
And all the clouds that lower’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Here Richard comes across as happily triumphant. Only in retrospect can we see the dissatisfaction and sarcasm in his words. Ian McKellern, in his film, handled it quite deftly by speaking these opening lines at a celebration banquet and then cutting to Richard in the gents muttering his real thoughts as he pisses.

In amplifying the changes that peace has brought, Richard’s hatred of the quiet life becomes increasingly obvious.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings;
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Interesting here that the alliteration and assonance is very helpful in memorising the text. Eg monuments, merry meetings, marches, measures; bosom, brows, bruised. There is also a marked contrast between the dramatic, vivid images of war and the vague, weak activities of peace.

Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front,
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

This is excellent stuff. You still might think Richard a stern, puritanical soldier, bored by peace and offended by the sexual hedonism of the new court.

But. Ah, the ‘But’. ‘But I. . .’ Gone is the ‘we’ of the preceding lines as we move into section two.

But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass.
I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph.
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature

(I can never say that line before thinking Olivier’s delivery – ‘chu, chu, chu’)

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.
Why I, in this weak, piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.

You could feel sorry for him. He certainly feels sorry for himself and his bitterness is palpable. Then he moves to the third section.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair, well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a lover
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Now I shall check and see if I got it right. Excellent. I wonder where I can get an Equity card.

England's Smoking Ban

July 1st, 2007, a date that will live in infamy, the day when that coalition of puritans and pursed-lipped killjoys, of do-gooders, nannies and busybodies, control freaks, know-alls, health fascists and interfuckingfering bastards finally got their wish and banned smoking in ‘enclosed public places’. In other words my pub.

Who are these people, who talk of saving lives, but don’t know the first thing about living the short life we have? They’re not saving lives. At best they’re prolonging its misery until something other than cancer else gets us or rots our brains into not caring who or where we are.

Who are they? They’re teetotallers, vegetarians, feminists, calorie-counters, joggers, bureaucrats, censors. Eunuchs. How dare they tell me what to do, how to live? The same people who would have cockerels banned from the countryside and then pollute it with their four-by-fours; who fret about battery chickens and the fate of foxes, but are happy to pay for their daughter’s abortion; preen themselves over their catalytic converter and wonder why the police have nothing better to do than stop them speeding.

Listen to them with their hypocritical cant. How their heart bleeds for me and my health. How they lie awake at night crying over the poor barmaids breathing in all that smoke. Well, don’t weep for me, I do enough of that for myself; and if the barmaids don’t like it, let them work somewhere else. If other customers don’t like it, let them go and clutter up another bar with their requests for café latté and drinking chocolate.

Have we lost faith in the market? What’s wrong with a little smoking apartheid? Even God is supposed to have allowed us freedom of choice.

These people don’t like smokers because smokers don’t labour under the illusion that life is serious. Smokers are atheistic, amoral, adulterous, alcoholic, anarchistic – and, OK, on occasion absolute arseholes.

But they’re also gregarious, friendly, talkative, laid back and plain interesting. Non-smokers are attracted to them because they’re sick of the other nicotinophobes with their suburban gardens and their car-washing Sundays and their 2.4 children - who may be spoiled, fat and stupid, but at least they’re ‘not exposed to smoking’ – and their little wives with their little jobs and their sensible hairstyles and comfy flip-flops and their holiday videos and their sanctimonious pension schemes.

I know them. I’ve met hundreds of them. Frightened little people, envious pigmy-souled, joyless-hearted Lilliputians, striving to pin down free-spirited giants with a thousand restrictive threads.

Bitter? You bet I’m bitter. This is war, you petty-minded tyrants. And I’m going to enjoy it.

Now, where did I put my fags?