I see that the white poppies for
Remembrance Sunday are making a comeback.
Well, actually I don’t see that at all as I’ve not seen anyone wearing
one. In fact, now I think on it, I’ve
never seen anyone wearing one and it’s not as if I move in particularly
militaristic circles.
No, what I mean is that I’ve seen an advert
for them and someone posting in The Guardian website mentioned them. Apparently they were first put on sale in
1933. I’d always thought of them as an
‘80s thing, along with ‘Nuklear Power nein danke’ window stickers. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that
Margaret Thatcher disapproved of them which doubtless explains their sudden
flurry of popularity.
The idea behind the white poppy is to show
remembrance for war dead while making it clear that the wearer is against war
and therein lies the problem. I’m not
sure that the red poppy does denote that the wearer is happy and comfortable
about the prospect of people dying in war.
Rather the opposite I’d always thought.
Some white poppy supporters point to the fact that the red one is worn
predominantly by Unionists in Northern Ireland in which case I would suggest
that said Unionists be castigated for turning it into an overtly political
symbol, just as the English fascist movements tried to co-opt the St George
flag. I loathe football, but I am
pleased that assorted World Cups have won that back for us.
With the best will in the world, I find the
white poppy uncomfortable. It smells too
strongly of the kind of sanctimoniousness that assumes a moral superiority to
all around. I always think of the lines
in the Tom Lehrer song, The Folk Song Army:
We
are the folk song army
Every
one of us cares.
We
all hate poverty, war and injustice
Unlike
the rest of you squares.
And here in its entirety:
While the red poppy might (and I say might)
have honoured only the Allied dead of the ’14-’18 war, it certainly does not
now. Furthermore as the appalling bullying that
went on a couple of years back that demanded that everyone should wear one
seems to have died down, I am wearing a red poppy this year. And if anyone wishes to wear a white one, let
them do so, but be aware that it may carry as many negative connotations as the
red ones you abjure.
An old photograph, small part of background
carefully distorted, just enough to cause discomfort, a sense of wrongness, a
feel of the uncanny, the creepy. Play
with photoshop. It’s a laugh.
An
impression of hair with a glow or nimbus behind it. Features and limbs unseen though there are
hints against the dark of things that seem sharp-edged and bone-white.
Photograph not quite enough. Needs more.
Needs a caption.
‘He
said glory would be our reward. All we
had to do was give. We gave all. We received out reward.’
That should do it.
It’s spreading.
Some wannabe film students muck around with
their mates and a digital camera camera.
Ten shaky, blurry seconds of something.
Something that gives an impression of hair and bone.
‘God,
what’s that? What is it?’
‘Get out. Just get out.
I’m right behind you!’
Sudden blackout with electronic screech.
All very Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity.
‘Tonight
we want your calls about your spooky experiences!’
‘It
was like the thing in the photograph, you know, the famous one of the
playground. Well I was haunted by that
thing all my childhood. It’s real.’
Result!
Losers out there think it’s true.
Tossers.
The
Website That Let’s You Tell Your True Life Paranormal stories
They’ve given it a name. They’ve given it a gender!
gloryboy
Is it too late to copyright?
A
flicker in the mirror. That which makes
you suddenly check that there’s nothing behind you. The light patch in the dark of the trees that is suddenly wrong.
you’ve
got gloryboy on your trail
Houston we have a meme!
Pastor
Caleb Gems performs exorcisms to rid you of evil
‘I
know that gloryboy exists’
‘There
he was, watching me from the woods, a darkness darker than that around. A strange glow. Hair and bone’
‘In
my bedroom, in the corner, just there for a moment I saw him from the corner of
my eye. I see him still.’
‘Please
God, save me from gloryboy.’
“gloryboy:
He Exists” by Pastor Caleb Gems, $10 special price when you click here.
Coming through. Coming through.
At
gloryboy.com you can get your gloryboy mugs, tee shirts, mouse mats and
badges. gloryboy is here with your
reward!
A focal point. New bogeyman.
Something is hungry. Something is
ready to feed.
There’s
glory for You!
Follow
the new hilarious gloryboy web-strip!
You’ll get your reward!
Coming through.
Coming through.
Reward.
Where did that come from? Be seeing old glory himself if not careful:)
Photograph
from 1912 shows that gloryboy has been with us a long time.
Oh give me strength!
Does
this medieval woodcut show gloryboy?
No it doesn’t. It can’t.
I created him, it, two years ago for a competition.
Never did get my reward.
Latest
gloryboy footage and testimony. Is he
after our children?
They’ve added so much to him. Not just a name and a gender. They’ve given him a look, motives, an MO.
It was meant to be something odd, a bit
creepy, unsettling. Not some comic book
villain with complete backstory.
It’s not mine anymore.
He’s not mine anymore.
gloryboy has escaped.
And I think he’s coming home.
Tonight’s
discussion.
The
unexplained disappearance of the self-proclaimed creator of gloryboy continues
to cause controversy.
Or you can read it, along with some comments about the its writing, over at Spring Heeled Jack.
Meanwhile, in the run up to Samhain this
year I’ve been reading up on my ghostly literature. Best of the batch so far, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver which I
read, liked, admired, but was not overly scared or unnerved by it until this
morning when I was in the bath. No I
don’t know why either. Baths don’t feature
in the book at all, as far as I can recall and as I only read it a week back,
if they did they weren’t major plot drivers.
Odd.
I’ve come across this delayed reaction to
ghost stories before, noticeably with MR James.
A detail from the story will suddenly pop back into my mind at an
unexpected moment. It can be
inconvenient.
Another read was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. This was made into the famous 1963 film, The Haunting and the script there
follows the novel very closely.
Interestingly though, the most famously scary sequence in the film is
less so in the novel, while the novel’s most alarming scene comes across as
somewhat melodramatic in the film.
Disappointments have included a
surprisingly clumsy and unsubtle effort by Henry James called The Romance of Certain Old Clothes. I hope he gets his act together before I get
to Turn of the Screw.
Finally, here’s a song from a film which,
despite its title, has curiously little to do with Tim Burton:
And if you are out tonight, as always, be
watchful for there may be things abroad which should not be.
Reading a Doctor Nikola* novel the other month, I was startled when the
action suddenly shifted to my own fair Newcastle upon Tyne,
town of my birth and current abode. I
shouldn’t be surprised as the city turns up in a surprising number of novels.
*Late 19th century master villain who
appeared in a series of novels notable for the fact that, contrary to the
author’s intention one assumes, the good doctor is only really likable
character
First, and far and away most unexpectedly,
is the curious fact that the three musketeers come here at one point. Honest.
It’s in the sequel to the original novel, Twenty Years After, set – well, you get the idea. It turns out that twenty years after the
events of the first book brings us to the English Civil War and the musketeers
attempt to rescue Charles I while he is held in durance vile in, yup, Newcastle
upon Tyne. Spoilers for novel and, indeed, English history: they fail.
It so happens that I read this book in France. I was in Paris and being the pretentious drear that I
am, I had decided to take a French book with me to read while I was there and having already read The Three Musketeers chose Twenty Years After. So there I was in a hotel room in the Latin Quarter
reading about Newcastle. That was odd.
Other unexpected appearances of my fair
city occur in Jane Austen’s Pride &
Prejudice in which – if memory serves, I don't have a copy to hand – a rakish army officer is sent to Fenham Barracks, which lies to the west of the city, in
disgrace which seems right and proper. Susanna
Clarke in the highly recommended Jonathan
Strange & Mr Norrell posits Newcastle as
the centre of magic in her version of England
while the comic book
character John Constantine, created by Alan Moore, had an experience up here
that led to him spending some time in a secure mental health facility.
Interestingly, the one novel in which
Newcastle does not, apparently, appear is Jack’s
Return Home by Ted Lewis upon which Get Carter was based, and while the film is definitely set in Newcastle (and
Gateshead, Whitley Bay and Northumberland) the book, or so I’m told,
never specifies which city it’s set in.
The film, by the way, was originally going to be filmed in Hull, according to what
I’ve read, but when that proved to be impracticable, the filming moved here.
So, forget Cookson country. Let's market the North East as Musketeer
country which would, let’s face it, be more fun than concentrating on those
novels in which, in accordance to local by-laws, the main character’s father or
grandfather is obliged to be killed/crippled/drowned in a coal fall down the pit or out
at sea with the fishing fleet.
A couple of weeks back, wearing my Spring Heeled Jack hat, I attended the British Fantasy Society’s annual wingding, or
FantasyCon as they will call it.
As they
define fantasy to include weird fiction I saw it as a chance to put in a bit of
networking and get an idea of what’s what in the genre these days.
So what did I discover? Of this I shall sing:
1/
Obvious point, but does need to made for
those of us whose idea of ‘fantasy’ is that it’s solely made up of those
interminable multi-volume sagas involving magical artifacts and epic quests and
heroes who introduce themselves as so and so’s son assuming an interest in
their genealogy which most of us simply do not share, is that it’s a cheerfully
open genre happy to embrace just about anything it likes. There was none of that ‘Oh I never read
[insert whatever/whoever here]’ that so bedevils a lot of book talk.
2/
I don’t know if this is usual as I’ve never
been to one of these things before, but it is an odd experience to find
yourself reading a book in a bar and looking up to see the author sitting three
foot away from you.* Or even more a
challenge to etiquette, to realise one is sitting opposite an author whose name
you recognise and whose work you are aware of
but have never actually read.
What, if anything, can you say?
Nothing in my case.
*’Ash’ and James Herbert if you were wondering
3/
Fantasy authors are engagingly shy about
that unhappy business known as networking.
I thought I’d missed a trick by only having the logo, a mildly sinister
quote and the web address on the cards I scattered about cheerfully, but
apparently not.
4/
Mark Gattiss disliked the new iDalek design
and argued against it. He was therefore
particularly irritated that it was introduced in a story written by him.
He also uses the neologism Poliakoffian to describe very, very slow
moving drama.
5/
The members of the panel discussing the
member’s vote on ‘Best Ghost Story’ all admire MR James but really wish the
membership would stop voting “Oh,
Whistle, And I’ll Come to You, My Lad” in every single bloody year.
.
Any many other things besides, but you'll have to wait for the next volume to find out what manner of things they may be.
I was trying to find some conkers the other
day. I managed two which I fear is
scarcely sufficient for my purpose.
And that would be? Keeping out spiders. A correspondent to The Guardian had stated
firmly that conkers keep spiders away and as we are entering the spider season
and given that spiders and me have a complicated relationship (faults on both
sides I’m sure, but I’d just as rather not have them in the flat) this seemed
like a plan, albeit one unlikely to work.
But a low level arachnophobe like myself has to try what he can.
In the meantime I have spreading the
word. A till driver at Tesco who was
fretting that there had been a spider in her car while she was driving to work
and would still be there when her shift ended, was very taken with the idea and
vowed there and then to fill her car with the nuts as soon as. I just hope they don’t all roll under the
brake pedal, though that would make for an entertaining inquest.
Meanwhile the female half of the couple in
the ground floor flat (the male half was once bitten by a moth as long time
readers of this blog may recall) was also fascinated by the idea and has asked
me to report on whether it works which strikes me as tricky as I will have to
show the absence of spiders. A bit like
the old joke about the chap who carries an anti-tiger charm in Scotland and
when asked why states that he hasn’t been bitten by one yet.
But my researches may come to naught as I
am finding it hard to find any, as stated above. I have put out a plea on facebook, the modern
equivalent of chaining yourself to the railings outside the Houses of
Parliament and will keep looking.
So it’s possible that they may have found Richard III’s skeleton? Gosh.
I had the chance to visit the place where the Battle of Bosworth Field apparently didn’t actually happen (as recounted here) and as stated, just by the canal is a rather sweet little memorial at the spot where, tradition has it, Richard died. If memory serves, the small monument had an inscription to ‘the last English king’ which was odd as the Plantagenets were French. As the peerless 1066 & All That points out, the last English king of England was Edward the Confessor as after that we have Harold (Danish), the Normans and then Plantagenets (French) then the Tudors (Welsh) and the Stuarts (Scottish) and finally the Hanovers/Windsors (German). And people say that the English are insular.
It is thought that the skeleton might be Richard because it has signs of curvature of the spine. I had thought that version of him was Tudor propaganda (x-rays have shown that the famous portrait of him was later altered) and wonder what this will do for those people who believe him to be a highly maligned figure.
I’m sure you’ve heard about this, Richard was a good king who didn’t murder the Princes in the Tower (though I side with George MacDonald Fraser who, like Cicero, asked cui bono) and was an all-round good egg unlike the untrustworthy wife-executing and altogether a bit too Celtic Tudors. It’s one of those things that people get surprisingly wound up about to the surprise to outsiders. Other instances I’ve recently come across on the net include the behaviour of George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, the behaviour of the Doctor in the most recent episode of Dr Who and the incidental music in the last couple of seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation which apparently spoilt one poor chap’s childhood.
The observant amongst you, ie all of you, will notice that all these examples above come from the world of science fiction film and television. I do paddle in the shallows of that particular fandom and one of the attractions is the high emotions that it produces in a few unhappy souls. ‘But what about the pain Jackson caused me!’ wailed one commentator on a forum about the Lord of the Rings films in response to the moderator complaining that his increasingly vicious comments were causing pain to others. You get it with Sherlock Holmes fans as well where liking the recent Robert Downey characterisation is a sin beyond forgiveness or redemption. I know connoisseurs of horror cinema who still hold Barry Norman in open contempt for his many slights on their preferred genre.
In the meantime, here’s the excellent Horrible Histories programme doing old King Dick with full admiration and open worship to whoever came up with rhyming ‘can you imagine it’ with ‘Plantagenet’.
I keep having this strange feeling that
there’s a dog in the room. Oh,
good. There is.
I’m looking after him while his owners
(assorted members of the clan) are away for a long weekend. I think of him as a dog in law. I’ve done this before and he knows me well so
it’s no great ordeal, rather the opposite even if he is a touch excitable and
tactile in his affection. At least he’s
sleeping through nights now. The first
time he came to live at my expense, I awoke at about four in the morning as I
sometimes do and sleepily went for my glass of water before falling back asleep
until a reasonable hour. On this
occasion though I was brought to a fuller awakeness by a furry snout and wet
nose thrust towards my face, attached to a dog that was not only wagging its
tail but its whole body in that way that long-leggéd canines can. ‘Oh great,’ he seemed to saying, ‘this is way
earlier for my walk than my usual owners manage!’ I was obliged to disillusion him but he bore
the sorrow well.
Better than he did than when he arrived on
that first visit. After his pack had
left, he took to his basket and whenever I looked around I could see just his
two eyes poking out from his bed and gazing at me with complete and total
reproach. As it happened, another
brother ‘phoned just then so I shared my discomfort with him. He failed to help by pointing out that not
only was the dog obviously thinking ‘I’ll never see them again’, he was also
thinking ‘And it’s all your fault.’ Very helpful. My lodger cheered up soon enough though, round about lunchtime if memory serves.
It’s all been less fraught this time. A twenty-something neighbour referred to him as a doggy, being
apparently unaware that there is an age restriction on that word, otherwise all
well so far. And best of all, we haven’t
found a corpse.
As any reader of the crime reports in the
papers will be aware, murder victims are frequently found by dog walkers and
this always alarms me mildly whenever I am dog sitting. He’s here for another day, so fingers
crossed, I really don’t have the time right now for the paperwork.
On an entirely different topic, it was
brought to my attention last night that for the last four years I have been
completely misunderstanding the purpose of those label things that you put on
your blog. I thought they had something
to do with search engines, apparently not.
It seems they’re an aid to navigating to my other blog entries. To quote Jessica Hynes’ character in Twenty
Twelve: ‘Who knew?’.
Given I was in the habit of ensuring that I
never repeated a label, this will have meant that anyone clicking on one will
probably have been directed back to the blog they’d just read.
