the old Country

Proper coffee
Not got Sky
Tesco's/Tesco
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Was Blair's greatest success creating a generation who unquestioningly absorb the phrase 'social networking' into their lexicon?
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In our crass-builded, glass-bloated, green-belted world Sunday is for washing the car, tinned peaches and carnation milk.

A sergeant's world it is now, the world of the lay-by and the civic improvement scheme.

Country is park and shore is marina, spare time is leisure and more, year by year. We have become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility.
The hedges come down from the silent fields. The lease is out on the corner site.
A butterfly is an event.

Were we closer to the ground as children or is the grass emptier now?

Tidy the old into the tall flats. Desolation at the fourteen storeys becomes a view.

Who now dies at home? Who sees death? We sicken and fade in a hospital ward, and dying is for doctors with a phone call to the family.

Once we had a romantic and old-fashioned conception of honour, of patriotism, chivalry and duty. But it was a duty which didn't have much to do with justice, with social justice anyway. And in default of that justice and in pursuit of it, that was how the great words came to be cancelled out. The crowd has found the door into the secret garden. Now they will tear up the flowers by the roots, strip the borders and strew them with paper and broken bottles.

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I feel like a beggar accepting alms
Then being pelted with figs
I study my steadily declining chart placings
They greet me with freezing cold inhospitality
Hey, where did that bloke go who said I was vital?

I possess the mild air of a retail tobacconist
That’s because I’m a retail tobacconist
But the mayflies on a Berkshire trout river
Would probably tell you a different story
About ham-fisted diadems and momentary daydreams
Of mythical dividends and illusory boardroom seats

In the room festooned with fat beef certificates
From county shows
Duff Leg Bryn had drank too much again
Most of Wem was steering clear of him
“I’ve got no time for this twelfth consecutive Rose Bowl”

‘Cos on Sunday next at ten to four
I’ve got an invitation for
A trip around Katharine Hamnett’s warehouse
Followed by dinner with David Emanuel
Who I can’t wait to tell about my dream
In which the almost illegal Elton Welsby
Is dressed as a french maid on a moonless byway
Licking his lips as he creeps ever closer
Fast falls the eventide
Fast falls the eventide

The public appearance of bitter ex-soap stars
Who thought they could go on and do other things besides
The Centre Court amusement at the ballboy’s mishap
That bobbing up and down thing that they do at the Proms
Opinionated weather forecasters telling me it’s going to be a miserable day
Miserable to who? I quite like a bit of drizzle, so stick to the facts

Channel Four presents “Blowjob”
Introduced by Adrian and Sophie Horn
Who is of course one bloke with a pierced dick
Who’s just had the nod from Planet 24
Hear him say “surreal”, “bizarre”, “sad git”
“Yes indeedy”, “completely and utterly”, “footy”, “anorak” and “respect”
Before whipping the audience up into doing the Time Warp

Watch him take us live to The Queen’s Arse and Firkin
Where Joseph Bloggs and his amazing Technicolor shellsuit
Are about to abort their Steely Dan routine
And instead embark upon fifteen minutes of mantra-filled oompah
Fifteen minutes of mantra-filled oompah
Fifteen minutes of mantra-filled oompah

Adrian-stroke-Sophie wants us, the viewers, to ring in
And say how we think the punters will react

These are a few of my favourite things…

I’m incredibly bored with the word “millennium”
I’m with the Jehovah’s Witnesses
Millions now earmarked will later be wasted
Her Majesty, marvellous, Mother – The Musical
The fireworks lighting up the Houses of Parliament
Death in Trafalgar Square, death in the armchair
Of cliched old spinsters who’ve never been loved
Every day is Australia day
“Sons and Daughters” and “Home and Away”
And then the news comes on and the sound goes down
‘Cos she can’t be bothered with all them politicians
They’re all just a bunch of flaming drongos

She died with her telly on, eighty-seven and confused
With not enough hospital beds ‘cos all the money’s been used
On the end of the century party preparations
And they reckon that the last thing she saw in her life was
Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican
Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican

T for Toxteth, T for Tennessee
T for Toxteth, T for Tennessee
T for Thatcher, that girl that made a wreck out of me

Oh the lady labelled me an idle
Oh the lady labelled me an idle
Oh the lady labelled me an idle layabout
Layabout
Layabout


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Berkshire and Hampshire, Leicester and Rutland, those were the Edwardian counties. One breath of their pine-laden air and I am through the door in the wall, back in the land of lost content. I am a young man on a summer afternoon at Melton or Belvoir, sitting in the garden with my life before me and the whole vale dumb in the heat. Is it my fancy? Did I ever take tea on those matchless lawns? Did apricots ripen against old walls and the great horn still sound at sunset? One boat on the wan, listless waters of the lake and nothing stirring in Europe for years and years and years.


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Scotland's insecurities come out differently. It's a kind of 'we're shit we know we are, but really we're great we are' mentality. You sometimes get the impression in Scotland that we are trying to improve, trying to better ourselves, but under the disguise of not trying to improve and not trying to better ourselves. We do things we don't want to do to avoid the appearance of doing the things that we do want to do.

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mid-table
there's nothing much on my fork
it's alright though
cos I can go for my walk
around Cartmel

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