Political Love Song

I’ll be the Petronella Wyatt
To your Boris Johnson
The shy undergraduate
From Portillo’s youth
More than a footnote
In your memoirs
A flattering testimony
When the papers hear the truth

I’m a diligent under-secratery
Ambitious, sharp and keen
We’ll out-scandalise Profumo
Make Back to Basics Squeaky Clean

I’ll suck your toes
In a football strip
Rendezvous on Hampstead Heath
You be the Speaker
I’ll have the chief whip
Clenched firmly between my teeth

Looking back, it all began
In 1963
The chatterly ban
Was a flash in the pan
And I met my first MP

You be Thatcher, I’ll be Dennis
We’ll weather the political storm
I’m Edwina Currie to your John Major
Something new, a break from the Norm

I’ve met with Hughes and Oaten
I’m the bottle in Kennedy’s drawer
I’ve had right hooks from Prescott
And still come back for more

A week’s a long time in Politics
And I know they say sleaze is a sin
But if you’ve got a spare day round Westminster
I’ll do my best to fit you in.

Five Things

1. I'm reading about the Cold War at the moment. It's incredible.
2. I'm going out for a drink with a pigeon-and-squirrel-hater this evening.
3. "Dave the Machine, Dave the Machine.
How you pistons gleam. Yeah, Yeah they gleam.
Dave the Machine, Dave the Machine.
Your so tuff and mean. Iron like you reign supreme."
4. There's only nine days left to register to take part in the Brighton Fringe.
5. Academic Fraud / Plagarism / Plagarising something insignificant and obscure.
6. Spending all of yesterday filled with apathy.
7. Dirty Girl. Thumb Stump.
8. Stronger than she looks.
9. Andrew Tibbetts' 100 Posts about my Sex Life.
10. You'll have to .. take the cups .. to the square tent .. wash them up .. tea from the square tent .. square tent ..
11. That was such an experience.
12. Spotting a fellow Woodcraft Folk and doing the Envoi in Sainsburies.
13. Vacuum Packer!
14. I wish I was one step ahead.
15. The Sainsburies Closing Down Reggae Party.
16. Dig Dig D. I. G. Metaphors.
17. I need to have the energy and dedication to start going to every poetry night in town, on my own if I have to.
18. Douglas Coupland is dead.
19. Patrick Moore is still alive.
20. Cup-of-tea-now?
21. We made an egg biscuit yesterday. Jed frothed up the egg white, put it in the vacuum packer and sucked all the air from it. Then we microwaved it and then finally depressurised it so it went flat. We need to make it more like a jaffa cake, possibly with a halved raw frozen egg yolk.
22. Lascivious.
23. Beware the dolphins, Jason.
24. I don't know where the bag of hair is any more.
25. You will note it says "Bob the Fish" on my 1998 diary. Now there's a pseudonym from the past.
26. Sitcom with Anne Frank and Sylvia Plath living in a converted bus.
27. I'd never trap a bee. I'd never hurt an owl.
28. The Canary of the Sea.
29. "Disgusting".
30. The Eye of the Swarm.

Motivation

miller time
Originally uploaded by groc.

So I have been thoroughly bad at keeping this up, which makes me ashamed. It is January, I am supposed to be being Productive. I totally sat down to be productive last night and all I did was spread misinformation on the Internet.

On the plus side, Sparks are the most excellent band ever. Honestly. They actually have EVERYTHING. Go listen to their songs on their michepase page.

There are so many things I want to do and I'm such a slack-lord. I'm supposed to be organising a Poetry Brothel and putting a book together and forming a Jill Dando theme pomp-rock band and working on the blueprints for Box Marley (the Christmas toy for 2007) and misleading Wilkipedeo and writing letters to various old friends and superimposing a crack pipe onto Craig Charles's hand digitally on every single episode of Red Dwarf and making them available on the internet and going to Cambridge and Birmingham and London and the Tring Museum of Taxidermy, and I haven't done a single thing off that list yet.

For shame! Having the internet in my house has NOT made me more productive. This is ace, however. oh!. It's a video, though.

Hopefully writing these things down will make me do them.

Second Hand Blu-Tax

Roast chicken monday
Originally uploaded by Sandygermsmanson.

Firstly I must apologise, I have of late been greatly slack in actually posting on this little scamp. I have, also, of late spent very little time at home, which may have something to do with it. Now, my wandering days are over, and I intend to be getting a domestic on as much as I possibly can. Or at least a work-on, which may be the same sort of thing.

I'm preparing various posts at home about all the non-Brighton things, so, for fear of accidentally repeating myself, they might have to wait for a few days until I can wrest my laptop from Daniel Taylor and blog the six weeks of different forms of transport I have taken part in.

Instead, let us return to the fair city of Brighton and Hove, otherwise known as the Quite Windy City (curse you, Chicago! Just because you've got a musical and you're the home of ER and Police Camera Action, you think you can purloin an epithet like that? B&H was called The Windy City when it was burnt to the ground by the French in 1506!). I'm at work. I'm having a cup of tea.

For the last week or two I've been in the grip of a great poststructuralist Archive Fever. I have boxes of it, the clutter of many a mopped brow and emptied pocket. When I was back in St. Albans, I turned my attention to 1995-1999. I've since been working my way through 2000-2005. The former was condensed down to a mere cupboard-full, and with many surprises and notable memorabilia, including some original Ky Tung Pang artwork, my 1998 diary, Malteser Dancefloor booklets (hell yeah!), and letters upon letters upon letters...


Ky Tung Pang self portrait, 1999


Cover of 1998 Diary

Not only has this delve into Nostalgia been productive and fun (I even found my Picture-Of-Drew-Kirk-Jacking-Off-That-Is-Signed-By-Alan-Fletcher), but it's filled me with a great desire to catch up with numberous people I've completely and utterly lost touch with. I hate losing touch with people at the best of times (I imagine it probably goes hand in hand with keeping great boxes full of 'souveniers' from the past), and leafing through these massive crates of forgotten clutter really brought it home. So this is another resolution for the '07. To find them and to bring them home. In a manner of speaking.

The other resolution, I think, was to form a band in the style of Queen, and record a concept album about the murder of Jill Dando, telling the dual stories of Jill Dando and Barry George, the Amateur Stuntman Turned Celebrity Obsessive accused and convicted of her murder. And we're going to dress as birds of prey and have bird-of-prey-handler glove stylee microphones. As has often been noted before, there's not enough innovation in the music scene these days.

January is a frugal month, and has been breeding much home economics from those around me. Tom made four loaves of bread in 27 hours yesterday, one after the other, whilst Jed is converting a massive heap of sevilles into marmalades of varying sweetness. I bought some blackbean sauce to cook with but ended up spooning it.

So the downside of working today is that I don't get to witness Andy and Jacob's viewing of some hot philosopher on philosopher action. They're having a grand viewing of Donald Davidson in conversation with John Mc Dowell. Much as I would love to watch these titans clash, not to mention Mc Dowell and Davidson, I may have to wait for another time.

More resolutions to follow, I imagine.