Watch Out for Flying Pencils

… Your republicanism is showing.

Which I hope is a smug and clever reversal of the habit of showing petticoats in support of the executed King Charles one. I can’t find anything about this so I may have dreamed it. It is smug and clever in my world anyway. Who is Big Borther?

I have a bad habit of telling my wife things which are not true. Not things like phoning to tell her I’m working late when I’m actually in the pub. I suppose last night’s example would explain. She is currently reading The Kindness of Strangers – Kate Adie’s biography part 1 which prompted the comment that she was not aware that Bofors was a Swedish company. I launched into a tale of how they were the mainstay of British air defence during WW2 because of the guns’ ability to be loaded with any old rubbish in the face of shortages of proper shells. When she believed this I managed to persuade her that despite protests from the vanguard of the “grow your own” movement, the Army found out that the most effective projectiles were potatoes which could take out several German aircraft at once. I hadn’t expected this to be believed so I was able to extend the story. At the point when I said that a German pilot managing to return home after a Bofors vegetable assault would use the starchy shrapnel peppering his aircraft to make a celebratory and reverent slap-up meal, I got a Paddington bear hard stare and a look which could have brought down a Dornier.

It does seem to me that the Germans had most of the best looking planes. Apart from the Spitfire, the Luftwaffe got all the best designs as if the Bauhaus was in on it somewhere. Most RAF planes looked like flying sheds but of course the bottom line is how they work and not what they look like. And of course the throaty sound of a Merlin engine knocks the weedy German phutters into being so “last war”. The RAF flight has been over our house several times and each time the distant sound of the engines has me out of the house like a small boy, staring at the horizon through squinting eyes like some iconic military man on a Soviet poster. Dudley Moore’s line about Volvo’s from that film about advertising – they’re boxy but they’re good - seems to apply here. I exclude that stupid, three-engined Junkers from this analysis; it was made of corrugated iron!

It has been years since I listened to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. My original CD is somewhere in the pile in the garage, and so I feel guilty about getting the re-mastered version which through Amazon is mush easier than emptying out the rubbish. However, I have to say that for once, the re-mastering has made a clear difference to the sound of the record, a clear improvement on the top end, evident even through my memory of the original version. Maybe this is placebo in that I expect an improvement and in the face of lack of evidence have assumed that the artists and record company are telling the truth. Musically, it sounds like a recent album; admittedly one made by someone with the sensibilities of 25 years ago, but still original, still different, still with some sort of comment on the world simply by being a random collection of found speech without any virtue other than being musically ‘right’ for the track it accompanies. The sleeve notes said that Byrne and Eno wanted to go into retreat somewhere and return with this album, pretending it was a genuine ethnic collection. I’m not sure they would have been able to pull that off and maybe that is why they didn’t bother but then again, like cinema audiences were scared by the early stop-motion animation of King Kong the first, maybe the rock audiences of 25 years ago could be fooled by such a trick. However, some of MLITBOG is obviously ENO and I suspect quite a bit of it is obviously David Byrne – I have to admit that I don’t know Talking Heads or his solo work to be sure. That is like the game that was mentioned in David Lodge’s Changing Places where literary academics have to try and outdo each other by revealing classic books which they have not read.

And finally ..

… two things to really annoy you.

The US gently criticises China for not allowing free-speech and worship and all the things which let me say that our dear leader should be kicked out of office with no pension and made to live in one of those tumble-down flats near the canal – deep breath – and then they go and prosecute someone for shouting at the Chinese boss. A dangerous weapon the human voice!

AND …

The wife of our dear leader, spending £275 a DAY on hairdos AND charging it to the party.

Well they annoy me anyway.