Too Much To Declare

Nicked from Subville, via Welsh Celt Girl and Safriz. I chose the handcuffs

A.L.E.C.W.E.S.T.O.N. Jr. Baby Doll -- $21

In my friendly local French cafe today, a tall, ruggedly good-looking man of about my age gave me an intimidatingly hostile stare before sitting down, with his back to me, at the next table.

Perhaps he usually sat where I was sitting. Or he thought he recogised me and didn't like the memories. Or that... No point in speculating.

He and his friend began talking about the music biz. His younger friend was a record producer, specialising in adding 'weird bits' (I quote) to otherwise bland tracks. The tall man told a story about a band he'd once been in... I returned to reading... once the word Sugarbabes drifted to my table.

When they got to go, the tall guy had no interest in me, but I got the feeling he thought he was famous, or should have been - the way he walked, smiled...

The French and Polish staff haven't much interest in the status of whom they serve. "There is this BBC woman who comes," S, the waiter, tells me. "Everyone says she is a celebrity, big time." He shrugs and laughs.

Whatever. I still didn't like the way the tall guy had looked at me. It reminded me of a look I once got from Terry Gilliam...

see next post

Memory Lane, again. 35 years ago. 1971. Probably the host misheard, or was exagerating, or wanted to get rid of me for other reasons... nevertheless...

I am at a party in a leafy west london suburb. The room is packed. I'm chatting to a group of friends near some french windows. The star guest arrive through the far door. Terry Gilliam; Monty Python is everyone's favourite programme.

For some reason he stares across the room at me. For some reason, he stares back at him.

A few minutes later, the host of the party (and my immediate boss at the BBC) takes me aside. "I think it's best if you leave, now," he advises. "We've ordered a taxi." He indicates the french window as my means of exit.

I am dumbfounded.

"Have you ever said anything to Terry..?" my host asks.

"I've never met the guy." I'd been planning to attempt a chat, without seeming too eager.

"Well, it's nothing to worry about, I'm sure. Apparently he gets like this sometimes, ha, ha. But he has taked a dislike to you for some reason."

"Oh, I see. But we don't all have to like..."

"I think it's best if you go." He puts his hand in my shoulder. "He is... er... threatening to kill you."

We all have our bad days.

...there was a very happy family. Georgina and Greg were still very much in love, twelve years after they met. Their three children, Denise, 10, Paula, 8, and Johnnie, 5, were bright and cheerful and never threw tantrums. Denise and Paula took it turns to do the washing up.

In fact, everything was pretty well perfect. Boring, almost, There's little more I can say about them...

Until, one day...

I've had an e-mail this afternoon from the Editor reading my novel. She apologises for the delay etc. etc. but says her report should be with me on Friday. No hint that she finds the manuscript brilliant, the best thing she's ever read, already placed with a publisher... Despite my vigorous attempts to play down my expectations, I suppose that's what I was hoping for. Some sort of miracle.

I've been niaive. I've put all my eggs in one basket... I'm stressed out.

Nose unblocked. Creativity stuck.

(undeclared entity warning)

Living on my own, the worst thing about having a cold is the feeling of isolation. Apart from being cross-examined by my mother on my symptoms twice a day, I don't really feel like phoning anyone else.

And, despite trying to fire up myself to blog, I cannot come up with much to write about.

Still, a runny nose is a lot better than yesterday's depression. And a cold - well it always seems out of my hands, in the lap of the gods. (I always blame myself when I get an attack of IBS)

So that's it for today. Back to the snooker... (another cold symptom)

Thanks in part to SOME PEOPLE'S supportive remarks, I am feel much better this morning, despite a night of barbecue-rotation on my bed.

Man 'flu! Huh!

No, not Borat.

Believe it or not, according to my SITEMETER, Too Much to Declare had a hit from Khazikstan today (even if I've got the spelling wrong)

I've got a nasty cold.

I feel apathetic and miserable. I can't read or write for very long, because the bridge of my glasses pinch my nose. Can't sleep much either.

In short, I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Please would some Friends, Aquaintances or Passers-By feel sorry for me instead.

And, if you don't mind, no 'useful suggestions', eg about nose spray. All I really need is lots of smileys, especially nice ones I don't know how to do.

Overnight, I realised I had a cold, although the symptoms seem to be hitting me in the wrong order. This one started with a runny nose, the sore throat only ariving this morning. And as for the pre-cold depression - that seems to have been on Thursday, a full 24 hours before any other symptoms....

So what? Well, Cold Protocol matters very much to my literal minded mother, who queries every variation in an illness's progress that does fit with the symptoms listed in her book.

Today, of course, being Saturday, is the day I usually visit her. But, besides the fact that I don't feel up to the journey, or driving her car and blah, blah, she never wants to run the risk of catching a cold. My visit has been banned. So, I'm at home and my mother has no one to cash a cheque or do the Waitrose (or any other kind of) shopping.

She'll manage somehow. I refuse to feel remotely guilty. I don't thing I've been ill, apart from IBS, since I started this blog.

It's strangely relaxing, to be moderately ill.

Later, with a new latin spring in my step, I went to see Marie Antoinette. (I haven't been to the cinema a lot recently, because I haven't got anyone to go with, poor me), but today I was surprising myself with my enthusiam

Marie Anthoinette: The idiot rituals of the court and displayed magificently. The acting is terrific, the music eclectic - a wonderful scene of a masked ball made to sound like a rave party.

But what did get me down was the description the Odeon had given the film outside: MODERATE SEX. It had a certificate, which presumably gives adequate Parental Guidance, so the words seem superfluous, prurient, vulgar; in fact they can only be there to attract wankers who have no other interest in the movie.

Which Cretin Executive thought up MODERATE SEX? Is that the opposite of EXTREME SEX? LEFT OF CENTRE SEX? RIGHT WING SEX? THIRD WAY...?

It's hard work these days to have any experience without encountering the commercial wrapping.

For the record, Marie Antoinette is very sexy.

For reasons I won't go into for the moment, I have been playing very little music on my brilliant stereo system recently. And the FM signal here is so weak that it's not particularly pleasurable to listen to radio.

Anyway, this morning as I made breakfast I decided to put a CD on. I fancied something grand and orchestral; but my first choice, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra got stuck on the first few bars, and almost by accident I picked West Side Story - lying in a plile, unprotected by its sleave.

And by the time I reached Maria, I was howling with tears. It's one of those pieces of music that has that effect on me. During my brief (or rather, currently suspended) acting career, I sometimes used to run Maria through my head when I needed to cry.

Maria, Maria, Maria,
The most beautiful sound I have ever heard.
Sing it loud and there's music playing,
Singing soft and it's almost like praying...

Damn. I blubbering again.

It's that Latin thing. The passionate intensity of feeling. No one else in my family seems to have it. It really is (as I alluded to briefly below) as if a Mediterrenean demon entered me at birth, and I have beed trying to suppress it ever since (Incidentally I look like a cross between both my parents, so I can only fantasise.

Memory Lane again
In I959 or 1960, I saw the original London production of West Side Story, and I couldn't believe something on the stage could be so exciting. Bernstein's music intricate and rich, the acting, dancing and singing making my young heart stop. By compariosn, My Fair Lady which I had seen the year before seem so false and vacuous.

As with everything else my two - already long divorced - parents had diverging opinions. My mother had no desire to see West Side Story. Hers was (and is) the world of My Fair Lady and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Harmlessly romantic, with sexual energy hidden from view.

It's ridiculous, I know, but in my mother's eyes I feel like a failed character in My Fair Lady. I have never dared join the Jets. But's that's where my heart is.

Deep down inside me I am good, I am good...
I am pychologically disturbed...

No time to give details of this morning's psychological revelations, but - briefly - my birth was a category mistake. A swap of genes in Heaven or more likely Hades: at least one of my parents is a Latin devil, my real mum probably Carmen... No wonder I have failed the role of being a gentle Englishman.

Details follow, este noche... manhana... Living comes before blogging today.

(UNDECLARED ENTITY WARNING)

Tomorrow I would like

A surprise

Something extraodinary to happen

Or a letter from a long lost friend

An e-mail asking for forgiveness

A chance encounter

A large cheque

An offer from a publisher

A wrong number that leads to passion, romance, or no more than a hilarious conversation

Or....

And it may happen. Because, having thought out what I wanted to say here, I came upstairs and found a ladybird
crawling over my screen. It seems to be fascinated with the icon marked System Preferences.

Poor thing.

It will probably be dead tomorrow.

"Are you pregnant, miss?" Lindsey, bright but alway trouble, asked from the back row.

Cecilia Thompson, a teacher in her second year at St Kylie's School for Girls, had dreaded this moment. She had known one of her pupils would be the first to notice.

'Macbeth: Act 3', she announced, unconvincingly. 'Alison, please explain to us the role played by Banquo's ghost.'

Cecilia had been avoiding the staffroom for weeks, and wearing a winter coat for Assembly. It would now be only a matter of time before the Headmistress, Devina Bradshaw, summoned Cecilia to her office and demanded to know the date of the wedding.

St Kylie's was a very strict school.

It felt so unfair. Cecilia had only slept with three men in her life; unfortunately, she had slept with them all on the same weekend. And again on the next.

How could she have got herself into this terrible mess? Jonathan...

[your turn]

...I feel good today. A little less cloud cover, I suppose.

There are a lot of miserably awful blogs on this site, aren't there? Pompous, self righteous, unaware... Perhaps we should all devise a Bottom Ten list. Of course I'd be at the top of many people's...

Awful blogs are the price we pay for Liberty

Reading my previous post this evening, especially one entitled GGRRRRR etc which has now been deleted, you may have got the impression I was in a rage, and indeed incapable of uploading a new picture for my Profile.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ahem.

The new picture is now in place, thanks to the help of Subville. Now those with a wicked disposition will be able make fun of it.

Yes, my temper has a short fuse. But also a short lifespan.

Peace and calm

Meanwhile, I spent most of the day visiting Hastings, then retreating.

My sister thinks it's about the only place in southern England I could afford to buy a flat. She met someone who said it was "very nice".

Frankly, it's a dump. Nothing good to be said abot it but the hills it's built on and the sea. Nowhere to have coffee, eat, hang out...

After hald an hour, as I walked along the front, I said aloud "This place is a dump!" A rather atteactive woman looked round. She looked out of place. Ahead, I suddenly noticed a cafe that appeared to be a cut above the rest. Stylish, even. She went inside. I did too, a bit embarassed to follow her.

But she and the barman/proprietor wer very friendly. She told me Hastings wasn't too bad, on the way up, blah smile blah. Things were looking up. I ordered some food, and sat down at a table - next to a pile of "The Pink Paper." Later she came over and took a copy.

A gay coffee bar. Still, it would be a place to make friends... Oh yeah? When I paid, the proprietor told me he had just sold the cafe and was moving abroad... Soon it would be a sytraight, ordinary, restaurant.

The only other lively place I noticed in Hastings was a tattoo parlour.

To be honest, I think if the Normans landed there now, 900 years later, they would return to France without hesitation.

And I returned to London on the next train

I have spent the last two and a half hours doing nothing except trying to upload a photo of me on to my Profile page.

Why can everyone else do it so easily?

It's an ordinary pic from a digital camera - but BCUK keeps telling me the file is too large. I've tried every program I've got to reduce its size (1.7thingies) Making it black and white reduces it to 1.2. Why is it so large? I am a cretin, clearly, not being able to change it. Cropping? I can't get it to work.

It gets worse. For an hour, when I placed it on my desktop, it took over the whole screen as background. My own giant left nostril reproaching me for being such an idiot. Somehow, I managed to get rid of it.

Big deal. None of you will be able to help me, because I've got a fucking Mac.

And this Editor is still playing up!

The clouds are killing me.

Not clouds - just fog in the sky. If we can't have sunshine, let's have rain, wild cloudscapes - some form of weather energy.

But what we have at the moment (in London, anyway) is the gloom that's the default weather in the Islands of ours. The gloom that has made Britain what it is today - passive aggressive.

(My mother loves the gloom; she can't stand direct sunlight)

I know - gloom is a lot better than floods, unbearable heat, water shortages, ecological disasters. But on a day like this, I couldn't care less about global warming. Or any issue of any kind. The weather makes me too apathetic. Give me sunshine and I'll begin to work on solving global warming.

This weather is worst in the south east of England. Elsewhere, at least the clouds move a little bit. Here, it feels they will sit up there for ever, enforcing their B list Puritanism - not Hell Fire, just eternal Gloom. And Greed and Fraud is okay. But whatever you do, shun Carnal Desire - the only sin in Southern England. If you've got to have sex, have it cynically.

IF I WERE RELIGIOUS, I WOULD WORSHIP THE SUN, AND THUNDER.

Supposing life as we know it is only a rehearsal.

What would you change for the First Night?

After last night's Fifty Years on, I thought I might as well go through my life, decade by decayed.

Forty years ago I just had started working as a "graduate management trainee" for the BBC. My first assignment was with Radio Features in Broadcasting House.

I shared an office with two other guys about my age. One was helping produce a series called "Suez: Ten Years After", the other a genial, smoothy type whose girlfriends made me wish I wasn't married. The three of us got on well. One day I was reading an article in the NME about the new drug/music culture in California; for the first time I came across the word "pychedelic", which the article explained. I told my friends, and soon it had become part of our vocabulary.

Our office was high up in the original Broadcasting House. The newsroom, which we had no work contact with, was below us in the "BH extension" (I learnt early that working for the BBC meant mastering a lexicon of intials - AH,RF, for example meant Assistant Head, Radio Features).

We could hear the Newsroom loudspeaker - the muffled noise, but barely the words. Twice a day or so, a voice would announce "PA snaps" - read off the ticker tape from the Press Association. A takeover bid... a new intiative of the Wilson Goverment... that sort of thing. In our office, we didn't bother to listen.

Then, on the 21st October, 1966, the loudspeaker voice began to make announcements every few minutes. We strained our ears... something about a mine in Wales... a disaster. We turned our office radio on... A school in a village we had never heard of called Aberfan had been buried in a landslide of coal, and many, many children had died.

Today, 40 years on, the Guardian reproduced their report of the state of affairs three days later:

At the latest count, 137 bodies had been taken from the school and the remains of the 11 demolished cottages. More bodies are expected to be recovered from the buries houses.
The chief constable said he feared all hope had to be anbandoned for those still missing - 51 children and an unknown number of adults...
National Coal Board specialists are now fairly certain that a mountain spring welling up inside the Aberfan coal tip caused the avalanche..

I can't hide it from myself any longer. I'm getting impatient. I finished writing almost four weeks ago, and the agents have had the manuscript for over three weeks. Their estimated 'turn round time' is 3-4 weeks.

Meanwhile, I am finding it harder and harder not to my put my life on hold. So many other things to do, less and less enthusiasm to do them.

It reminds me of the times, aged nine or ten, when I had just started boarding at school, waiting for my father to collect me long after all the other boys had been fetched by one or both of my parents.

Ever since, I have not been good at waiting.

Are we compatible?

It is awesome to have lived so long, and remember.

Okay, I was a preposterously precocious 13 year old. Aged 12, I had stood as a Liberal in my school's mock election, and almost won (practically the only Liberal victory in Britain that year! 6Mps, three nopposed by Conservatives).

But the British invasion of Suez and the uprising in Hungary was my political coming of age. It was the first time my dad's poltical view seemed wrong. He as ambivalent about Suez. As a campaigner against appeasement of Germany in the 1930s, my father regarded Nasser, the President of Egypt, but to little me the British Goverment's invasion just felt plain wrong.

As Suez and Hungary happened almost at the same time, it was hard for Britain and France (yes, then we close allies) to take a moral stand against the Russian tanks mowing down demonstrators in Budapest.

It all happened during my first, rather terrifying, term at public (ie fee paying, boarding) school. Everyone else was, of course, Tory to a boy. God know what the other boys thought about me reading The Observer, the only national paper that opposed the Suez caper (They lost a lot of circulation).

Once, my housemaster came into the dining room at breakfast time holding a copy of The Observer as if with tongs. A boy (not me!) had delivered it to his rooms instead of The Sunday Times. I can see the disgust on his face forty nine years later.

The Manchester Guardian, also anti-Suez, did not yet print in London. My father sent copies by post. Two years later, as precocious as ever, I had it sent by post every day from Manchester... Fifty years a Guardian reader. Oh, hell.

Looking back, I wonder why I wasn't bullied more than I was.

I'm getting more and more of these messages when I post, for no clear reason. Anyone else having the same problem recently?

Cannot post, please correct these errors:

• Parser error: Undeclared entity warning near rse. Get over

In my last post, I had to put "Get over"

a new line to have it accepted.

(There again, I had the post rejected when I didn't begin a new line.

Oh the wonders of software) (third attempt)

How many plasma TVs have you won today?

My score is two so far, just by surfing "respectable", regular sites.

Of course, when I clicked to accept the free prizes, I was forbidden to proceed, because I had unticked the box that said I was ready to receive e-mail about life insurance, holidays, blah, blah.....

So the TV is not free. It's offered on condition we accept junk mail. A plasma screen in exchange for the obligation to be bombarded.

The ads are fraudulent of course.

But are they illegal? Who does one complain to?

Hardly the biggest injustice in the world, I grant you. Just petty, sordid, humdrum marketing crime. How stupid of me to take it seriously. How naive to think free mean free or that I had been chosen to win anything. There's no such thing as a free lunch. We live in a capitalist universe.

Get over it.

I've got no pride.

Like many of you, I have vain fantasies of my blog being read and appreciated way beyond the confines of this particular site.

After ten days or more of deliberation (or more likely, waiting in a queue) I have been accepted for listing by Blogarama, one of the many para-blogsites (well, you think of a description). Like Mad about Blogging, but a bit less pointless.

Unfortunately, my entry rating is currently near-zero. It's bound to be innit? Nobody knows I'm there.

So I'm asking a favour. If you like this site, please click on the Blogarama icon on my masthead, follow the link, and rate TOO MUCH TO DECLARE one to ten. Just to get it off the ground.

I'll do the same for