MORE COCK RINGS AND DIPSOMANIAC COUNSEL

My dear friends

Some of you may recoil in horror and alarm at the title of this sumptuous new post.  Some of you. However, my Sitemeter (which I installed all on my own, no help from anyone, Scarlet least of all) shows me that the overwhelming majority of readers arrived chez moi via these vile words.  Cock rings outweigh Dipsomania by an imperial ton, but it was ever thus, I suppose.  Anyhoo, in the interests of driving traffic, I shall use salacious titles from now on.  My next post, for example, is to be entitled Ass Raised Up Entered From Behind.  It will be about Wimbledon Fortnight.

I apologise for my sluggishness this week, but my consort, Scandinavian restaurateur Lars Torrders, is beginning to bore.  And not in a good way.  He can only express his affection through aggressive display and still believes Rodnina and Zaitsev to be the last word in pairs-skating.  I cannot abide a man who lives so stolidly in the past.  Another prime example of this type is Bob Crow, head honcho of the RMT, whose discourses have been spread across several news programmes like an appalling poultice.  Mr Crow is articulate, but I have found myself lost in the scented mists of time, when the names of Sid Weighell, Mick McGahey and Tom Jackson were known to all.  Who remembers them now?  (Apart from me and Kevin Musgrove).  In those days we would have yawned at the spats we now witness between Mr and Mrs Peter Andre; we were fed on tougher meat.  What we wanted, and what we got, was Joe Gormley v Sir Derek Ezra.  To see Gormley (the miners) square up to Sir Derek (the management) was a weekly treat for any enquiring mind.  Sir Derek would routinely regret the threat of redundancies.  Joe would regret the possibility of a strike.  The audience would regret that the two of them couldn't exchange jobs, since it was always obvious that Joe's grasp of the problem was equal to Dezza's, and was accompanied by a far better memory.  

Also enjoyable was any imbroglio featuring Sir Peter Parker and Ray Buckton (sometimes with Sid Weighell, who always sat to one side, often in profile; his catch-phrase "let me make this absolutely clear" was guaranteed to turn previously transparent water into a dreadful oily silt).  Key references were ACAS, The Terms of Reference, Ratified by Executive,  Violated and Abrogated.  Bob Crow simply isn't in this league.  There has been absolutely no progress made.  It is to cry.  

Everything seems terribly toned down these days; there is no great distinction.  Homogenous is putting it politely.  It is an environmental disaster of the first order.  Everyone looks the same - and I don't just mean Ken Dodd and Margaret Beckett - but assuredly, all our young people strive to be clones.  It is most depressing.   I wonder if there is something in the water?  In the early 1950s the male Jews born in Israel were nicknamed "sabra" after the watery fruit of the cactus.  In physical appearance they were invariably taller than their parents, broader, mostly blond or brown haired, frequently with a short nose and blue eyes.  (The girls, on the other hand, remained physically closer to the European Jewish type).  The young male's most striking feature was that he looked entirely un-Jewish.  The phenomenon was a striking confirmation of the theory that the environment has a greater formative influence than heredity, and that what we commonly regard as racial characteristics are no such thing, but a product of sustained social pressure and a specific way of life.  Professor Toynbee called it "the stimulus of penalisations".  I can certainly see how the dread soup of our modern life has resulted in the ill-favoured and poorly dressed young people we see in places such as Telford and most of Wiltshire.  

Anyhoo, back to the burden of my song.  Lars is on thin ice with me, particularly now that I have met his mother.  Her diet is firmly herring-based, and he overheard me refer to her as Lady MacBreath.  I fear that the stimulus of penalisations may be coming my way.