More camp twattery from your resident demented

Trying to make sense of it all

This is a tough time of year for many - perhaps even most of us. Post-Christmas and the dull, damp, cold, short days, seem endless. It's not until April that we properly see the green shoots of Spring.

I've tried going out over Xmas in Wells - but not very much. It's difficult to meet people. It's a bit like being the last people on the dating app. You soon realise why you're there - no one else will have you! 

You're half-cut when you do meet people, you swap numbers, and when you do contact them for a drink or to give them a link to your erudite and hilarious new blogpost, they either ignore you or don't open it at all. 

Oh god - it's him!

People have busy lives too. I'm there all the while shouting "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!"

I chatted with a chap from London and he said he found it difficult too. I spent most of my life in the city (that's London btw, not the City of Wells) and was a reluctant returnee.

I know I'm intolerant and opinionated but I have tried over the 18 months I've been here. 

Wells and I are just not meant for each other

It could be that my hitherto brilliantly concealed madness is seeping out all around me, thus giving the game away as I stand ankle-deep in puddles of undiluted insanity .

The only answer is to get out more and visit/bug existing friends, so I shall have to do that this year.

I've been watching a ton of movies and I just watched Inland Empire - David Lynch's last feature film from 2007 which he self-funded. What I like about Lynch is his reliance on dreams as puzzles to slowly elucidate for the watcher. And if they don't that's fine - whose dreams really ever make sense or have a comprehensible message?

The best hair, ever.

Having done the Mindfulness course and looking back at my past actions with my customary self-criticism (I am my harshest critic) along with my cynical attitude to just about everything, I can see I have fewer answers and more questions.

Just another minnow in an ocean trying to make sense of the indefinable, incomprehensible chaos.

Trump's inauguration doesn't help of course.

My Dad suggested I'd have been better off if my sister had been running my business. 

The whole thing is I always hated work, even when it was something I enjoyed doing. I know that that's the system, but I was born into it. I didn't have a choice.

And I've met so called life-coaches who say 'if ya ain't lovin' whatchya doing it's the wrong job for you!'

Well I say bullshit. Where’s it written that you have to love work, or even like it? 

It just sells a bunch of dumb self-help books on Amazon.

It's easier for some people. The rest of us just have to mug on and get on with it.

I’m also of the opinion that work stress and sleepless nights contributed to my dementia.

Excerpts of unwritten novels (in my head)

Talking of David Lynch who sadly died recently, he loved to sit in silence and the ideas would come to him, like a solitary angler waiting for his first bite.

I get silly lines in my head, usually spoken in a particular voice, when I'm least expecting it. Walking the dog, doing the dishes, that kind of thing.

Example: the start of another forgettable Merchant Ivory film based on the boring novel of some Oxbridge stately homo about the unrequited love from Smedley minor, in the voice of some luvvie or other:

'It was at Ebstone where I wrote my third novel; 'The Crimson and The Beige. Ahhh...Ebstone...'

Or a children's book for girls about ponies, narrated by Kenneth Moore:

'Ginny loved to ride, and everyone loved to ride Ginny!'

I never got any further with that one...

But Ginny did! 

Good old Ginny!

Film reviews

The Substance - amazing body horror from French director Coralie Fargeat. Demi Moore plays an aging starlet who now has an 80s style aerobics show. To her horror, she discovers her grotesque boss played by Dennis Quaid, wants to replace her with a beautiful sexy young thing. But luckily someone has slipped her the details of a new wonder ‘thing’ called The Substance. What could possibly go wrong?

Fabulous performances, not only great set design and cinematography, but incredible sound design too. An awesome tale about women, their bodies, aging, beauty, the patriarchy and the price to be paid. 9/10

Poor Things - released last year. Bonkers Alice in Wonderland meets Frankenstein in a steampunk wrapping. Based on the book of the same name by Alasdair Gray (which I actually read many years ago) this is a bawdy tale of a child’s brain in a woman’s body, and how she experiences the world as she grows up feeling neither guilt nor shame.

Check out the architectural jokes of the set, if you're that way inclined.

Very refreshing and enlightening. I loved it. 9/10

Nosferatu(alt title: 'Sleepin’ and a-creepin'.) 102 years after the Max Shreck original, this beautifully designed and rather characterless film neither creeps us out nor scares.

It looks beautiful in incredibly low-light which at a modern cinema works brilliantly. But the characters are essentially cyphers and the last 3rd does drag a bit. 6.5/10.

Eerie, weird and tragic.

For proper nightmares, the Werner Herzog version is properly unsettling - a bizarre, eerie film shot mainly in natural light. It’s like a Breughel painting come to life. It also has the most rats I’ve ever seen in a movie, with the ethereal beauty of Isabelle Adjani and the hideous tragic monster fittingly portrayed by Klaus Kinski.

Toilet of the Week

They don’t make them like this anymore. Back when Sheffield steel meant quality and Britain led the world in toilet construction: a vintage Unitron. 

Built like a tank, it can cope with anything. 

Very high water level in the bowl which was a thing back then. 

Now that’s a man’s toilet. That’s not sexist as I know some of you women can really let rip.

Great is a word often overused but coupled with Andrex quilted toilet paper, this is a truly great toileting experience .

Seat: 8/10

Flush: 10/10

Ambience: 7/10

Total: 8.3/10

I am NOT a bloody hipster

I've always been into prog, fusion, Zappa, as well as all those wonderful themes from library music.

And people like me have a fancy moustache as we can't grow hair where it’s intended (on top of me 'ead) so it's compensation: a sporran/mirkin for my face.

In fact, if anything I'm trying to emulate my hero, the inventor, Wilf Lunn.

Wilf, and dragon.

One of the many great inventions was this owl scarer. Why it never went into production I have no idea.

British invention you know.

Copy-wrong

Bullshit copy seen this week on a Leica website: 

"It fits seamlessly into your creative lifestyle."

Just like my Tom Ford buttplug.

50% of us are below average

Reliable Sauce

According to theoretical physicists, in approximately 3-4 billion years the sun will swell to engulf planet earth, and to make matters worse the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own.

According to Raymond Blanc, the best watercress is to be found in Oxfordshire.

According to a wealthy couple I know, it's best to avoid the world and just enjoy yourselves in a cosy bubble of indulgence.

According to many Christian fundamentalists, the earth is between 6-10,000 years old.

According to the Daily Mail, a glass of red wine a day is very good for you.

According to the Catholic Church, transubstantiation turns the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

According to Trump, Haitians are eating people's cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

According to Mother Teresa, the biggest threat to world peace is abortion.

According to my neighbour, 5G masts will make our brains compliant with however the Deep State wants us to behave.

According to Liz Truss, Kier Starmer should cease and desist from defaming her 'reputation' by claiming she crashed the economy.

According to the Daily Mail, alcohol of any kind is very bad for you.

According to that weird couple in the pub, white people in the UK are being systematically replaced by brown people.

According to statistics 50% of people in the UK are of below average intelligence.

According to Elon Musk, the prevalence of DEI in the Los Angeles fire department meant more people died in fires as not enough firefighters were white men.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, we don't need fact-checkers on social media anymore.

According to my Dad the best slippers are to be found in Swansea.

Ethics or Morals?

The difference: simply put, morals are our personal code of behaviour, while ethics are more of a societal code, for example medical ethics and the social mores of things such as dinner parties, fairness, generosity, helping; that kind of thing. Principles that keep our society fair and just.

I can confuse myself very easily these days, so what do I want to talk about? Ah yes, these statistics.

According to JL research, when asked whether running the UK with a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with parliament or elections:

61% of 18-34 year olds agreed.

49% of 35-54 year olds agreed.

29% of over 55s agreed.

Generations of people who’ve come into this world with no concept let alone interest of anything that preceded their existence, even by a generation. As ethics is not taught, nor social history, it would seem little wonder they have no appreciation and completely take for granted the rights they have in a liberal democracy, which previous generations struggled for and who some even gave their lives for. 

Feminism for example. I can think of young women who say they're not feminists but who would be horrified at the world even 15-20 years ago. 

As LP Harltey said: 'The past is a different country. They do things differently there.'

Fran Liebovitz said of the 'me too' movement that up until this point she just accepted the world had always been a sexist patriarchy, and then suddenly it just changed seemingly last week. 

But it’s taken centuries to get to this point, and a lot of brave individuals putting themselves into the spotlight and often paying the consequences.

We have huge problems in our society. Extremist and populist groups are very good at exploiting these things, offering simple solutions to very complicated, difficult problems, usually in the form of blaming this group or that for our woes.

This ties in with the recent US election and their culture wars, where the Democrats were accused of only paying attention to women's rights, when boys' educational standards are dropping, male suicide is trending upwards, and males just hear they are to blame for the bad stuff in the world.

Here is a terrific interview with a guy called Richard Reeves who runs a think tank in the States, and has written a book called "Of Boys and Men". Instead of using emotive language and blaming huge sections of society with phrases like 'Toxic Masculinity" he says we can emancipate women and help young men at the same time. We don't just have to help one group at a time.

I'm also shallow and male enough to say I don't think I'd be able to speak if Desi Lydic interviewed me. She's so beautiful, smart and funny I'd probably melt into a giggling puddle of patheticness.

Tiredosity

It's been pretty cold here in Northern Europe. It is winter after all. 

I always think my wanting to stay in bed at this time of year is atavistic for when our pre-human incarnations hibernated.

It's so lovely under my duvet. It really is. 

There's plenty of room...

But you should know I sleep with my socks on - restless feet. And wearing socks to bed is proven to help you get to sleep faster!

And of course it is very sexy.

Gaming

The other day when I Dungeon Mastered a 2-day Dungeons and Dragons adventure for the Pilton delinquents, I was very tired. It took me about 5 days to get over it in the end. 

Cue massive lie-ins at the weekend.

In fact gaming is coming back online - Thursdays, Mondays, and now Wednesdays , and the occasional Friday. Hurrah.

I DM'd last night - Thursdays have been erratic for a while now but I think we're back online now, even though we meet up in person. A new Wednesday session via an online platrform with Jono, Larry and Adrian is forthcoming, and the Mondays we (Sacha, Boyd, Tim Eddie and I) play on Zoom is going well.

Thank the gods. I need gaming. I need that dopamine hit, I need to fuel my imagination, I need to interact with other humans, I need to riff and do arithmetic and descibe incredible scenes to people. 

I got really excited before the game, picturing the journey the party makes underwater on the back of a whale. So I was able to describe it really well.

The previous part of the adventure was a mess, but this is far more tangible in my mind, and by all accounts we had a better experience as a group because of that.

In other news, Tomos (the spaniel who I walk every weekday)is very naughty at the moment. He's nearly 2 which I guess equates to being a teenager. He's very naughty and he's a terrible coprophagiac.

In fact, he's acting like a punk rocker.

I'm rambling.

"Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. He knew not the names of the flowers, the plants and the trees, but he did know the strawberry dessert figures for Schleswig-Holstein."

The best writer since sliced bread

The subtleties of language

I read in the paper, that pompous old curmudgeon Kingsley Amis in his book 'The King's English', bemoaned how illiterate the world had become that he was having to devote a chapter to the difference between 'he might' and 'he may',

I had to think about this and without having had an extensive education in English grammar (comprehensive education - in the UK sense) I had to think about the context and tone of the two phrases. 

If you think about a rich boy and a poor boy, the rich boy may get in to Oxford, but the poor boy might if he tries hard enough. 

Or you ask your uncle if he has a non-percussive drill bit. If he's a DIY enthusiast he may just have one. If he only dabbles now and again he might have one.

'May' is just the higher likelihood.

That's it. 

Aural hallucinations 

I always put on ambient music from the Calm app when I go to bed. I have to have absolute darkness as well, so I wear a silk eye-mask which every time I wake (at least once every night for a pee) is around my neck.

But I've recently been hearing music in white noise, and the other night just as I was dozing off a trumpet fanfare. 

Bear in mind this was at 1am and despite it coming from the music room - and we do possess a trumpet - no one was minded play it at that time.

Luckily it only lasted a second, but it was a little startling.

Coupled with my slight visual hallucinations of white objects in my peripheral vision suddenly pinging into existence like a like they've just been switched on, this must be a taste of things to come.         

Pilton psychos

I just spent 2 days Dming in Pilton for the older kids. It was good fun, but as usual utterly exhausting. I realised on Thursday that the adventure I'd hoped would last the 2 days was almost complete, so I spent another couple of hours on Thursday evening setting up a concluding part. 

It was a bit of an obvious adjunct to the first part but their parents had paid for the time so that was all that was important. 

The whole premise was the party had met up as the only non-goblins at an ancient citadel. One of the party had found a large oval crystal on a dead goblin. They fled the citadel with the goblins in pursuit, fleeing into a valley. But the goblins eventually caught up with them and a battle ensued, ending with a stray arrow hitting a hornets' next and scattering the gobbos.

The main part of the quest was a whodunnit as 2 warring families in a vibrant market each accuse the other of sabotaging their respective businesses. 

Initially the traders were reluctant to talk to strangers, so the party had to endear themselves to the locals by taking part in 'It's a Knockout'-style games, and the locals would more readily impart clues that would lead the party to come to a conclusion.

The lad to my left was getting frustrated as he just wanted his character to kill everything then set fire to what was left, so for the last part on Friday I put in a ton of extreme violence to satisfy him. 

We were like that at his age too, and look how well we turned out!

Kids, eh?

I guess this is how writers of sagas set things up - have a bunch of threads which you don't know initially where they’re going to go, but which you can work out later. 

It's better to have unresolved threads which can become plot-hooks, than none at all.

Not having them means you have to start again with a brand new adventure each time. 

3 days later and I'm still absolutely wiped out by this 2 day session.  

What I'm reading

Earth to Moon - by Moon Unit Zappa. Autobiographical tale of growing up in a counter-culture family with a workaholic artist for a father and a long-suffering wife for a mother. 

I'd read the real frank Zappa Book which was pretty dissatisfying. This is far more honest and thorough as to how Frank’s behaviour affected his family. For instance, he would sometimes return from long tours with a groupie to sleep with - leaving his wife Gail upstairs to sleep on her own. Nice. 

Then he’d be in his recording studio in the basement for the rest of the time, sleeping during the day.

So we see the flip side of the artist - the solipsistic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, tyrant. The art comes first; everything else is secondary. The genius must be tapped.

The parents would wander round naked, and shout at each other, there were murals of orgies the kids hated and all the while her mother got increasingly frustrated and angry.

All Moon wanted was to spend time with her dad and get a hug from her mum, which were never forthcoming.

Moon writes brilliantly and I'd give it an 8/10.

I'm also reading another autobiography, this time by Adrian Edmondson, called 'Berserker.' It's supposed to be funny but having been a fan of Rik and Ade back in the day, the humour feels so familiar that I feel I've heard all these jokes before. 

I'll plod on with it as I'm still at the beginning.

What I'm watching

I was watching multiple YouTube videos on politics, but it's just an endless loop of the same shit. 

So then I started watching interviews with the very out-there maverick film makers I really like - David Lynch, Russ Meyer, John Waters and Werner Herzog.

Great Russ Meyer montage from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but may be a bit rude for Alison...

Waters and Herzog are just brilliant speakers and I could listen to them for days. I do a pretty good Werner Herzog impression. He is a one-off and his early works like The Enigma of Caspar Hauser are like a Bruegel painting come to life. He doesn't make films like other people. His documentaries are also wonderful.

John Waters is a great raconteur and there are a ton of interviews on YouTube which are hilarious. The 'Pope of Trash' started off making films with all his misfit friends in the late 60s and ended up making Hairspray (the original - not the musical), Cry Baby and Serial Mom - the latter which I've never seen. 

Herzog shares a joke with his leading man

It's nice to see people like this succeed, especially when cinema is dominated by the likes of James Cameron and Michael Bay🤮.

I've also watched Silo season 2 on Apple TV which is terrific. And I'm currently rewatching the totally unique Severance, created by Ben Stiller, in preparation for season 2 which premiers on January 17th.

The most original programme in years

Plans for 2025

The usual: drink less, exercise more, go to the cinema, theatre and take some walks in the country. 

What's more important than the above is to improve my rather crap social life by visiting friends.

So ideally all of the above but with an emphasis on getting out and about - which is precisely what Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) prevents you from doing! The old executive functions being offline and all that.

I shall have to battle forth and keep going.

VERDICT: Must try harder!