"Your starter for..."
...is the opening track on Elton John's "Blue Moves", a rather lumbering double album from 1976 which I bought on vinyl for about 50p, in mint condition, at a car boot sale in Boreham, Essex, last summer, but have only played Sides 1 & 2 as they weren't good enough to make me feel that Sides 3 & 4 were worth playing... yet. But standards change, and "Blue Moves" might well be a phrase to describe this rather muted (after less than 48 hours) election. Both in the sense that we know there will be Tory gains, and also that we feel it in our bones that at some point in the campaign (probably several points), someone will wish to Play Dirty.
I'm taking for granted the notion that anyone visiting this page will know that this is a UK election blog, for the 2005 election: Chris B. might be slow putting Turtle updates on the web, but he ain't that slow. Besides which, this is the main line, the direct keyboard to publication interface: which means that I get to see this on the web instantaneously, and you, dear reader, are deprived of the benefit of such 20th century literary devices as snappy soundbites, tight editing, and, as Greg Dyke used to say before he was knifed in the back, "Cutting The Crap". This is my first blog, and from reading a scattering of others it seems that, to misquote McLuhan (who would have loved the web - but Wikipedia says he died in 1980), the tedium is the message. (I was going to put 'the waffle is the message', and then make a lame joke about US breakfasts, but fortunately I went to the toilet and when I came back I thought of the play on words. Unfortunately Google shows that 264 other people thought of it before me. But before this treads into Dave Gorman territory...)
I've always had trouble remembering that the reader needs paragraph breaks when writing first-take stuff like this. Having said that, it should be possible to reformat this script in double-spaced type using your browser... or is it? That outruns the sum of my abilities with Mozilla Firefox - although I guess you could always cut and paste into Word, or you could print the page out and stick it on your head, for that matter. But the way the British weather is treating us, there will not be a need for makeshift sunscreens any time soon... snow is forecast for the weekend, ferchrissakes. Snow in April.. down sarf! Maybe it's North Korea's secret weather machine at work again, trying to destabilise the results in a "major western power" (?) A search on Google for "North Korea" "weather machine" turns up 104 hits, including the Al Jazeera homepage...
But spouting nonsense phrases into the 'Net to get nonsense back will be wearing thin with you already, and no mistake. You are here for election analysis... I'm only one day late for the start of the official campaign with this first post, Royal Mail is often later (ha ha...) My strategy is to watch TV as normal and pick up whatever information I can, and then to read one national paper in detail each day, to get an in-depth but partial view of the campaign. There will be little point trying to read every word written on this election as it happens... that would entail trawling round for two-bit efforts like this, for example. If you're going to be partial, be very partial... in both senses of the word - as in 'not whole', and as in 'not neutral'. As Robert Plant once said (for no obvious reason in its context, but we will analyse Led Zeppelin on another day, 'In The Evening', when the campaign gets real thin...) 'you know sometimes words have two meanings'. And the question we will be asking in a few days when the manifestos come out is, do the words have two meanings, or none? An interesting debate... for the non-politicians.
But anyway, I've started my one-paper-a-day regime (a literary diet as it would be, but for the fact I almost never read the bloody press in normal circumstances) with an easy cop-out option: The Evening Standard. I didn't buy a paper this morning as Chris didn't give the go-ahead to this blog until this afternoon, and I forgot to steal a copy of the Telegraph, my favoured starter option, from work today. The Standard is a vile piss-pot of a paper, really. Victor Lewis Smith is good grubby fun, like a coagulating Chelmsford takeaway curry, but hardly worth 40p. The paper's politics mix the Mail's middle class take on Mussolini with special pleading for London's city dwellers - "please reduce the Congestion Charge so we can be fleeced by Camden traffic wardens as we park our 4X4s", and what-have-you. the odd thing about the ES today was that there was less politics in it than normal. The main focus of attention seemed to be Grace Jones, who assaulted a ticket checker on the Eurostar from Paris to London who requested that she upgrade her First Class ticket to 'Premium Cabin' First Class ... maybe she reminded him of Russell Harty. A two page spread for '12 Londoners who will help us gauge how voters are leaning'... some select quotes: "he won't vote Conservative but he won't vote Labour either". "...describes himself as 'completely floating' [maybe the Natural Law Party are back on the beat]." "For the first time she is thinking about not voting at all". "I've decided that George Galloway is the businessman's friend - the best choice to lead a National Coalition in our present difficulties".
OK, I made one of those up, but it's anodyne stuff for anodyne minds. People said 2001 was boring and predictable, but the bizarre thing is that the polls show the result is dead tight this time round, and nobody seems to give a toss. Labour averages about 2 points ahead of the Tories at this time... that's similar to the state of the polls in 1992 - and look what happened then. So why does nobody on the Tory side think they can do it? The only Tory I've heard recently saying he felt they could win the election was Howard Flight, at an Institute of Chartered Accountants "business breakfast". One day later, he was out - deselected after being caught on tape for saying the Tories wanted to cut tax, big time. Once upon a time a Tory candidate would have been deselected for saying the Tories didn't want to cut tax big time... but perhaps this is the true success of Tony Blair. Maybe he has created a world where the Tories cannot Say What They Mean... maybe he says it for them. Certainly when I read a headline like "no new taxes for five years, says Blair" it sounds a bit like William Hague's 'tax guarantee' from 1999. Or George Bush (Snr)'s "Read my lips"... losers one and all?
I still think that even though we have lost 'the Quiet Man' from the Tory leadership, this is the 'quiet election'... could it become 'The House [of Commons] That Roared'? (sorry - another poor play on words there, at the expense of Peter Sellers). This blogging takes a surprisingly long time... imagine if your life was this. If this was your only chance to show what you can do. and maybe it is. Apart from that slip of paper on May 5, that is... as TB says, "you're the boss." Just don't ask for any money while you're doing your job. That would be cash for questions... and Neil Hamilton will not be playing a part in this election campaign. Sad, in a way... on Louis Theroux meets the Hamiltons I quite liked the bugger. Put it this way... Hamilton is forced to walk around on reality TV for a living (although Christine's autobiography has just been published, I think)... but every other lying politician is still at large. And some are getting quite good at it. And quite large. Danny Finkelstein in the Telegraph or the Times (I can't remember which, but I dipped into it in the work common room) said that a general public mistrust of politicians is a bad thing as it tars all MPs with the same brush... even those who are brutally above board lose our respect. But then, not all hospital wards are infected with MRSA... but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be scared if I have to go in for an operation. This may be a bad analogy, but you'll need to explain why.
And so, on that happy note, I end for today. The kettle awaits... if this goes on I will have to stick a remote keyboard into the kitchen unit. G'night, and think about making a run for Pope if you wake up and find you are a baptised male Catholic.
I'm taking for granted the notion that anyone visiting this page will know that this is a UK election blog, for the 2005 election: Chris B. might be slow putting Turtle updates on the web, but he ain't that slow. Besides which, this is the main line, the direct keyboard to publication interface: which means that I get to see this on the web instantaneously, and you, dear reader, are deprived of the benefit of such 20th century literary devices as snappy soundbites, tight editing, and, as Greg Dyke used to say before he was knifed in the back, "Cutting The Crap". This is my first blog, and from reading a scattering of others it seems that, to misquote McLuhan (who would have loved the web - but Wikipedia says he died in 1980), the tedium is the message. (I was going to put 'the waffle is the message', and then make a lame joke about US breakfasts, but fortunately I went to the toilet and when I came back I thought of the play on words. Unfortunately Google shows that 264 other people thought of it before me. But before this treads into Dave Gorman territory...)
I've always had trouble remembering that the reader needs paragraph breaks when writing first-take stuff like this. Having said that, it should be possible to reformat this script in double-spaced type using your browser... or is it? That outruns the sum of my abilities with Mozilla Firefox - although I guess you could always cut and paste into Word, or you could print the page out and stick it on your head, for that matter. But the way the British weather is treating us, there will not be a need for makeshift sunscreens any time soon... snow is forecast for the weekend, ferchrissakes. Snow in April.. down sarf! Maybe it's North Korea's secret weather machine at work again, trying to destabilise the results in a "major western power" (?) A search on Google for "North Korea" "weather machine" turns up 104 hits, including the Al Jazeera homepage...
But spouting nonsense phrases into the 'Net to get nonsense back will be wearing thin with you already, and no mistake. You are here for election analysis... I'm only one day late for the start of the official campaign with this first post, Royal Mail is often later (ha ha...) My strategy is to watch TV as normal and pick up whatever information I can, and then to read one national paper in detail each day, to get an in-depth but partial view of the campaign. There will be little point trying to read every word written on this election as it happens... that would entail trawling round for two-bit efforts like this, for example. If you're going to be partial, be very partial... in both senses of the word - as in 'not whole', and as in 'not neutral'. As Robert Plant once said (for no obvious reason in its context, but we will analyse Led Zeppelin on another day, 'In The Evening', when the campaign gets real thin...) 'you know sometimes words have two meanings'. And the question we will be asking in a few days when the manifestos come out is, do the words have two meanings, or none? An interesting debate... for the non-politicians.
But anyway, I've started my one-paper-a-day regime (a literary diet as it would be, but for the fact I almost never read the bloody press in normal circumstances) with an easy cop-out option: The Evening Standard. I didn't buy a paper this morning as Chris didn't give the go-ahead to this blog until this afternoon, and I forgot to steal a copy of the Telegraph, my favoured starter option, from work today. The Standard is a vile piss-pot of a paper, really. Victor Lewis Smith is good grubby fun, like a coagulating Chelmsford takeaway curry, but hardly worth 40p. The paper's politics mix the Mail's middle class take on Mussolini with special pleading for London's city dwellers - "please reduce the Congestion Charge so we can be fleeced by Camden traffic wardens as we park our 4X4s", and what-have-you. the odd thing about the ES today was that there was less politics in it than normal. The main focus of attention seemed to be Grace Jones, who assaulted a ticket checker on the Eurostar from Paris to London who requested that she upgrade her First Class ticket to 'Premium Cabin' First Class ... maybe she reminded him of Russell Harty. A two page spread for '12 Londoners who will help us gauge how voters are leaning'... some select quotes: "he won't vote Conservative but he won't vote Labour either". "...describes himself as 'completely floating' [maybe the Natural Law Party are back on the beat]." "For the first time she is thinking about not voting at all". "I've decided that George Galloway is the businessman's friend - the best choice to lead a National Coalition in our present difficulties".
OK, I made one of those up, but it's anodyne stuff for anodyne minds. People said 2001 was boring and predictable, but the bizarre thing is that the polls show the result is dead tight this time round, and nobody seems to give a toss. Labour averages about 2 points ahead of the Tories at this time... that's similar to the state of the polls in 1992 - and look what happened then. So why does nobody on the Tory side think they can do it? The only Tory I've heard recently saying he felt they could win the election was Howard Flight, at an Institute of Chartered Accountants "business breakfast". One day later, he was out - deselected after being caught on tape for saying the Tories wanted to cut tax, big time. Once upon a time a Tory candidate would have been deselected for saying the Tories didn't want to cut tax big time... but perhaps this is the true success of Tony Blair. Maybe he has created a world where the Tories cannot Say What They Mean... maybe he says it for them. Certainly when I read a headline like "no new taxes for five years, says Blair" it sounds a bit like William Hague's 'tax guarantee' from 1999. Or George Bush (Snr)'s "Read my lips"... losers one and all?
I still think that even though we have lost 'the Quiet Man' from the Tory leadership, this is the 'quiet election'... could it become 'The House [of Commons] That Roared'? (sorry - another poor play on words there, at the expense of Peter Sellers). This blogging takes a surprisingly long time... imagine if your life was this. If this was your only chance to show what you can do. and maybe it is. Apart from that slip of paper on May 5, that is... as TB says, "you're the boss." Just don't ask for any money while you're doing your job. That would be cash for questions... and Neil Hamilton will not be playing a part in this election campaign. Sad, in a way... on Louis Theroux meets the Hamiltons I quite liked the bugger. Put it this way... Hamilton is forced to walk around on reality TV for a living (although Christine's autobiography has just been published, I think)... but every other lying politician is still at large. And some are getting quite good at it. And quite large. Danny Finkelstein in the Telegraph or the Times (I can't remember which, but I dipped into it in the work common room) said that a general public mistrust of politicians is a bad thing as it tars all MPs with the same brush... even those who are brutally above board lose our respect. But then, not all hospital wards are infected with MRSA... but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be scared if I have to go in for an operation. This may be a bad analogy, but you'll need to explain why.
And so, on that happy note, I end for today. The kettle awaits... if this goes on I will have to stick a remote keyboard into the kitchen unit. G'night, and think about making a run for Pope if you wake up and find you are a baptised male Catholic.
1 Comments:
Well, that was crap.
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