The Ministry Of Truth

Congratulations, Andy Bull, for so eloquently saying what I think but can’t put into words, in his immediate full time match-blog from Nantes on the astonishing Wales v Fiji:

There is something about spontaneous rugby, when it goes right, that makes it one of the most breathtaking sights in sport. The rapidity of thought, action, and decision-making are just marvellous. The ball moves so fast that your eyes can barely keep track, and every foot-shuffle, drop of the shoulder and deceptive swing of the hips catches you and everyone else by surprise.

It’s like the sensation you get when you’re running too fast down a rocky hill, your feet are moving too quickly beneath you and you can’t quite fathom how your brain and body are stopping you from tumbling head over tail. They just do. You have just enough control, and at the same time you’re oh-so-close to falling.

Dozens of decent examples abound on YouTube, including these two French tries v England and New Zealand, but there really is no substitute for being there, both for integrating these breathless moments in the drama of the game, and for the palpable sense of awe in the crowd as a move like this is unfolding.

Celebrity Wife Swap returns!

Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock lives with Pete Burns!

‘Hilarity’ doubtless ensues!

The Ministry might as well close: the world can’t get any more fucked up!

This is not a Bash Microsoft entry.

This is a Why We Still Need To Teach Arithmetic entry.

There is, therefore, a moral to this tale.

I love obituaries, don’t you?

Life is fascinating.  Well, not mine, obviously, but some people’s lives are.

Just last week I learned from reading the obits that Lady Jeanne Campbell, a British – ahem – “journalist”, fucked Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro IN THE SAME YEAR.  That’s serious commitment to the profession…

The decision of the fuckwits at Radio Five Barely Alive to ditch the wonderful Brief Lives weekly obituary magazine programme six months ago, just so they could save a bit of dosh to pay to Nick”y” Cuntbell, was unforgivable.

Mind you, I’m not sure I love obituaries quite as much as The Times thinks some its website users do:

Anyhoo, I noticed that RSS feed gem because I was comparing obits for Andy Norman, who croaked in Birmingham Airport the other day.  (I’ve flown out of Brum – I know how he felt.)

Only two of the broadsheets seem to have bothered with an obituary for Norman, which is a bit of a surprise.  The Times don’t name their obit authors and from reading their eulogy alone, you’d just think that Andy was a bit of a rogue.  This is all the more surprising given that Cliff Temple, referenced in the piece and for whose suicide Norman was partly blamed by a coroner, was a volunteer athletics coach and the respected athletics correspondent of the newspaper’s sister title, The Sunday Times.

Steven Downes in The Independent, on the other hand, has taken the opportunity to twist the knife into this individual’s corpse and the Minister, for one, applauds his honesty and refusal to toe the usual ‘don’t speak ill of the dead’ line.

I never met Norman.  I spoke to him once; that was more than enough.  I do know two people I have no reason to disbelieve who met and dealt with him regularly and said that, when he couldn’t be arsed to be charming (something he apparently only did – brilliantly – when money was at stake), he was the most objectionable human being it had ever been their misfortune to meet.

Whatever his good points, Andy Norman was a corrupt, racist bully who worked the Freemasonry cult network for all it was worth, routinely conspired with and aided and abetted drugs cheats to evade detection, drove a decent man to take his own life by falsely accusing him of paedophilia and of whom a QC remarked in an official enquiry report that he “remained deeply unconvinced by the man”.

I have complained elsewhere on this site that British sports administrators are too often well-intentioned but inept amateurs who are out of their depth running a bath and that the nation will continue to underachieve unless and until some genuine professional expertise is brought to bear on their sports’ structures and strategies.

Andy Norman, on the other hand, represented the dark (and in his case ample) underbelly that represented the unacceptable face of professionalism.

I send genuine condolences to his son and his estranged wife (whom I interviewed in 1986 and who seemed a charming, if massively driven, sportswoman) and I’m sorry if this column seems unnecessarily vindictive or distasteful (though I’ve never claimed to be a nice person), but the tune that’s been going round my head all afternoon has been Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down.

Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba
Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba
(1:44-2:02)

Much as this lyric should perhaps more rightly have formed part of the Cypriot Eurovision Song Contest entry for 1958, this 18-second-long joyous invocation of the unbridled joy of head-over-heels-in-love-ness provides the first of our Sublime Moments In Pop.

Co-written by songwriting team Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, Happy Together was turned down by various bands and singers before The Turtles started playing it as part of their live set.  Arranged by bassist Chip Douglas, the 1967 studio recording builds from a gentle, almost apologetic, opening guitar riff (0:00-0:07) to tell the age-old story of unrequited yearning.

Should our protagonist pick up the phone and call the girl he loves?  “If I should call you up, invest a dime,” accompanied by a low-in-the-mix piano (the only solo piano in the song, a lovely touch) tinkling to mimic the sound of a phone ringing (0:27-0:28).

The familiar chorus – “I can’t see me loving nobody but you for all my life/ When you’re with me, baby, the skies will be blue for all my life!” – is an overblown cacophony of trumpets, trombones, tubas, percussion and layer upon layer of vocals that arguably captures the giddy exuberance of youthful love better than any other pop record.

The arrangement and production of this record is so perfect that, in the second repeat of the verse, there’s even an oboe weaving a sublime pattern (1:28-1:44) beneath the vocals before the crescendo into the irresistible confection of the ba-ba-ba rendition of the chorus that makes this record one of the few genuine contenders for The Perfect Three-Minute Pop Song (2 minutes 52 seconds from start to finish).

The pay-off (too often dismissed as jokey frippery) – “How is the weather?” (2:21-2:22) – is actually our hero bottling the task at hand, admitting that even if he does invest his dime he won’t be able to tell his girl how he feels.  Keith West had his Excerpt From A Teenage Opera; Happy Together is the full Monty.

It would be wrong to dismiss the song as just another piece of the bubblegum fluff in the belly-button of the Summer of Love, for this is one of the songs that pre-dated and influenced the Summer of ’67: the single was recorded in March 1967, just a couple of weeks after the release of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane heralded the new vibe – and released a month later.  Perhaps it’s not cutting edge, but neither is it Scott Mackenzie’s San Francisco.

It is only fitting that it should take something special to knock Penny Lane from the top of the Billboard Hot 100: Happy Together was just that special (and was itself replaced after three weeks by something stupid called Somethin’ Stupid).  While the band produced a handful of hits Stateside either side of Happy Together, nothing would – or could – ever top this, their crowning achievement.

True to form, the British record-buying public proved their cluelessness by helping the single limp to only number 12 for two weeks while the chronic Somethin’ Stupid and crime against humanity Puppet On A String sat at number one; The Turtles’ follow-up hits She’d Rather Be With Me and Elenore both made the British Top 10.

Within three years of releasing Happy Together, The Turtles were no more but the band’s finest moment took on a life of its own and has been used in countless movies, TV programmes and – spit – advertisements for products as diverse as cars, chewing gum and electricity, in the process deservedly becoming the 44th most broadcast record of the 20th century in the USA.

Ring, ring.

“Hello.  [The Minister of Truth].”

“Why the Hell are you suing me?”

“Er, who are you?”

“I’m Mr. [Man With A Name].”

“Just a moment, Mr. [Man With A Name], while I have a look at the file.  [pause]  Ah, yes.  Mr. [Man With A Name]?”

“Yes.”

“You are the claimant in this matter, so you are actually suing us.”

“Oh.”

Slam.  Click.  Brr.

Rude Kid from Viz understood it. Bearded Baby acknowledges it in these pages. The Minister positively worships it. Charlie Brooker understands it better than anyone. Swearing and saying rude stuff is fucking brilliant. Brooker, right back on form with his latest piece for the Graun, captures it perfectly when he says:

“…sweary tastelessness is a celebration of life, as soaring and majestic as a gospel choir in full flow, and no amount of tedious squeamishness can alter that. “

I’m preaching to the converted I know.  And of course, swearing unimaginatively is dull and loads of people do that – principally, it has to be said, football fans. But a well-placed sweary insult, preferably over-exagerrated and inappropriate for the context, and, for a bonus point, entirely unnecessary, is a joy.

Literature is full of it. Not just Shakespeare, but Chaucer, Rabelais and Dylan Thomas. More recently, in Stephen Fry’s novel The Liar (Heinemann, 1991) the author recounts at length an episode as a young teacher, taking a group of 4th formers from prep school on an away trip to a local Cathedral school, probably in Dorset. Sadly I don’t have the text with me so you’ll have to go with my fuzzy memory, but I recall with some relish his wistful depictions of the innocence of youth, the bucolic landscape of the playing field at sundown, young ginger bowlers and batsmen whose kit was too big, “howzat sir?”, little handshakes after stumps, tea in the pavilion etc etc. Then, having transported you perfectly into the scene, he describes how, umpiring at the bowler’s end, he cheekily gives a boy from his own school not out, despite the youngster clearly having feathered the ball on the way to the keeper. At tea, his captain wanders across and after a brief discussion asks “But sir, you wouldn’t cheat would you?” Fry (for it is no doubt he) replies something along the lines of: “Young man, this is the most sacred game of Cricket. From its cradle in Hambledon, it has been played on the hallowed fields of England for a hundred and forty years, by knights, kings, princes and members of the holy orders. There is no sport in the land more noble, more perfect or more divine. I am your mentor, your guardian and your teacher and my solemn duty is to impart to you all the vitality and beauty of this majestic game. Of course I’m going to cunting well cheat.”

I’ll end with a couple more apostles.

I was told this morning by breathless news readers that we would have it confirmed that civilization was about to collapse, and it was all down to all that nasty gambling that’s been going on.

Well I happened to be lucky enough to see the 9.30 news conference where the Gambling Commission announced that most people are normal, and have a normal ability to resist spunking their hard-earned away.  That said, he also said some people do not fit in to that bracket, and we should be conscious of the temptations in their way.

This certainly fitted in to my own recent experience when I went in to a casino for the first time.  All dreams of suavely breaking the house whilst ordering Martinis went out the window with the words, “fuck that for a game of marbles” when I saw that it was a fiver a hand.  If I was going to waste that kind of money on idle recreation, I’d go down the lapdancing clubs where, quite interestingly, it is also “a fiver a hand.”

I loved this press conference because you could almost hear the journalists’ disappointment as they realised that they were going to have to think up a whole new demon all on their own.   He started by saying the first “big message” was that overall gambling had gone down (this was measured by counting the number of people who had gambled in any form in the last year).  If you remove the National Lottery, gambling had gone up slightly from 46% to 48% of the population.  But what was brilliant was his point that problem gambling had moved from 0.8% to 0.9% of all gamblers. So his second “big message” (he was big on big messages) was that there had been no statistically significant change in problem gambling in the UK in the last seven years.

Better still he went on to say that 99.9% of the population had a perfectly healthy relationship with gambling, and there was no reason to worry about them.

As if to ram the point home he then went on to say that Britain isn’t too bad, with only two countries having lower rates of problem gambling, six approximately similar and five that were worse.

What amuses me (but also really annoys me) is that if the results had gone any other way it would be all over the news.  I’ve had News 24 on in the background for an hour now, and it doesn’t even feature.  I even had to nose around on the BBC website a bit to find the story.

This isn’t a rant about “why is there never any good news on the tellybox?”  After all, a fairly dry statistical analysis about gambling habits is never going to be a jolly read whatever it says.  But why hasn’t it been reported that actually gambling isn’t the demon it’s been painted to be.  Nor was the minimum wage, or trade union recognition, the Human Rights Act or extended drinking hours.  And I don’t recall one million refugees turning up on the day and date predicted by the Daily Mail a couple of years ago.  Thousands of column inches have been wasted on how each one of these would cause the sky to fall in, yet when that doesn’t happen, no-one gets to challenge the media about it.

Perhaps this is where blogs come in.  Perhaps I’m beginning to see the democratizing effect of them, beyond just giving me an opportunity to sound off (and invariably use the word “cunt” at some time in my piece.  I will try to do one without the word sooner or later).

So a) what is it about this country that makes us so self-hating that we only enjoy it when we can beat ourselves up about how generally shit we are.  An English friend who has lived in the Netherlands, San Diego and Berlin in the last five years says it is a peculiarly British trait that now drives him bonkers.  This attitude seems to pervade any discussion from gambling to the weather, via drugs and public services.  Jules, being demi-Francais, what is your view?

and b) can we have our supercasino back, Mr Brown?  Or are you going to continue to be the duplicitous and opportunistic little cunt you have already demonstrated yourself to be about this and at least two other major issues I can think of.  After all, my little son of the Manse, it’s what the Commons voted for.

Well, I enjoyed that meeting.

I particularly enjoyed the bit when the fortysomething Tango-faced Mancunian woman yelled, “Liar!” across the conference room table and the Bloke With The Crew Cut, Tatts And Gut Twice The Size Of Poland on the other side announced that he found her “offensive”.

Still, no medical personnel were needed.

And everyone’s going to sue each other – which means the lawyers can fill their boots – so everything worked out OK in the end.

My employer today removed 350 “managers” from their desks and made them congregate in a theatre in an “East of England” town centre so that they could (a) “network”, (b) listen to a succession of senior managers drone on in front of bad PowerPoint presentations, and (c) receive the wisdom of a guest speaker.

(Talking of senior managers, the business’s two most senior executives were unable to make it, natch…)

The business does this four times a year, apparently, but it’s the first time it’s been inflicted on me.  I gather that the guest speakers in the past have been the usual nonsensical “motivational” speakers like illiterate ex-sportsmen but today we got the Chief Exec of the country’s largest private hospital.  By training, he is a doctor (Hippocratic oath and all); by public speaking style, he is pure MBA Graduate.

He spent 30 minutes telling us how his business leeched millions of pounds from the public coffers every year (this “private” hospital is 95% funded by the NHS, which apparently no longer provides mental health care itself – why would it, after all?) and had every intention, despite officially being a charity, of bleeding the taxpayer for millions more until every single one of the 125 acres of his hospital’s ground is blanketed beneath a duvet of £50 notes.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be motivated over the next three months by this man’s vulgar mercenariness but I’m sure you’d like to join me in thanking him for sparing the time to come and talk to us today.

Whatever happened to the good old days when employers didn’t even pretend to care?  What was wrong with a carriage clock and a handshake when you hit retirement and a turkey voucher every other Christmas?