Why I Despise the City of Chester

Chester is a city which doesn't exactly feel like how a city should feel. It's small, condensed, and in a very good way, totally haphazard. To describe it best, I could quote Gormenghast:

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs … And darkness winds between the characters.

Yet it's also a city that announces its age at every opportunity and, unless you travel there for the heritage, that heritage can sometimes plainly wear on your nerves. I think of it as a city that wants to play me for a fool; where the price of everything is inflated to maintain the mock Elizabethan standards.

The moment you step out of the station, you're greeted by paralyzed history. The arch over the entrance to the Queen Hotel car park proclaims 'Carriages & Post Horses For Hire', whilst across the road another hotel, one of the city's many listed buildings, is proudly titled the 'Town Crier'. Everything wears history but it's a history that only a naive fool (or American) would believe is real. Wikipedia dates the building to only 1865, originally titled either the 'Queen Commercial Hotel' or the 'Albion Hotel', whilst the role of the city's town crier it itself a recent re-innovation, reappearing sometime in the 1990s. None of this really matters, of course. Not to the tourists.

I've never been a tourist. I've visited Chester so regularly since childhood that I no longer have any sense of its novelty. At one point, I was hoping to get a lecturing job in the English department at the university (I didn't) and at another point I was working on the city's outskirts, often travelling into the city on my half-days to enjoy the shopping. It's distant enough to be only an occasional day out but close enough to be completely familiar.

There was a time when English towns retained some distinctive quality but every town in the UK resembles every other town and Chester, despite its pretensions, is still really more town that city. There are the ubiquitous shops and anything more is usually worth disregarding or cherishing intensely. Whether it's the self-important town criers, the struggling actors dressed as Roman centurions, or the old fashioned open-topped bus that carries tourists around, Chester is different and yet, for people who aren't tourists, there's also something about it that feels wrong. It's a veneer of special which really doesn't run that deep. This is that vintage England which you're not entirely sure is real or an illusion.

Because, these days, my visits to Chester are usually to support my sister who makes occasional visits to see a consultant there, we often use Abbey Taxies on Foregate Street. It's a small office, wedged between a couple of cafes, Argos and a Bargain Booze across the road, all the buildings like much of the city centre: a mixture of styles but with the popular black and white timber the dominant theme. Inside there's a cattle-pen turnstyle arrangement, which I assume is for weekend use, where drunks probably stack up for their taxis home. However, it's always empty during the day and you walk straight through to an office at the rear, ask for a taxi, and you are then directed through the building towards the street at the back. You emerge in an alley that resembles grubby backstreets everywhere and the city's Tudor spell is immediately broken by the endless red brick. The timber history, you realise, was skin deep and the real history is to be found elsewhere in the Roman ruins dotted around the outskirts of the city centre.

Yet, the illusion is not entirely why I never enjoy visiting Chester. It's hard to criticise any place that tries to be different in these days of mass produced shop fronts and, despite my cynicism, I know much of the history is real and I always feel a thrill when I remember that my favourite poet, John Donne, attended the funeral of Sir Thomas Egerton at the Cathedral. What I suppose I dislike is the ethos of the place. There was a time when there was a free bus that ran from the station into the city centre. Manchester has that and I think many other great cities have the same. It's a small thing but it makes you feel welcome. Chester now charges visitors for this honour and I begrudge the £1 you have to pay for each five minute journey on the cramped bus, four additional pounds for the two of us in addition to the already exorbitant train fare. It means that right from the moment you leave the station, Chester doesn't feel welcoming and it gets no better once you arrive in the city centre.

For the average person, Chester flaunts both its wealth and your lack of it. It's the only place I know where I feel genuinely poor. On Eastgate Street, in the shadow of the famous clock (erected 1769, or so it says in the Latin pressed in gold onto the red sandstone), stands the Chester Grosvenor Hotel. It's the kind of hotel that has men in uniforms guarding the entrance with a rigid smile and ex-military menace. It offers an eight course 'Tasting Menu' for 'just' £59 per person, with a 'Tasting Wine Menu Selection' for only another £45. If I'd wanted to stay there tonight, the cheapest room is £195 for the 'Classic Bedroom' or £455 for the 'Deluxe Suite'. I'd have to hope they also offer a 'Standard Broom Closet'.

I know there's no reason to begrudge the rich their privileges but the problem is that Chester makes that ostentation so public. Because the hotel's entrance opens right onto the main shopping thoroughfare, the wedding parties often mix with the tourists and locals in a strange blend of real wealth and absolute poverty. You can quickly find yourself walking through a wedding shot or pushing past some huge Rolls Royce or horse-drawn cart thick with garlands. Handsome people are daily seen posing in their perfect lives at perfect weddings you suspect will end in a messy divorce six months later. Often the confetti (every piece cut into a heart shape, no less) sticks to your boots, in the lapel of your coat, in the creases of your hat. Today, there was a bright red Jag, a stunning F-Type Coupe, pushing its way through the crowds; it's deep throated roar clearing a path. I've never been so close to one as I was when its exquisite nose nudged me out of the way.

Yet for all the money, the pretty people in their fashionable clothes and their clipped accents, Chester has very little class. Get there late in the afternoon and you discover that most places close at five PM and the local baristas (the friendliest people in the city, especially those in the two Neros on the streets Eastgate and Foregate) tell me that the city is pretty starved of culture at night. Anywhere that stays open is catering to the stag parties or muscled gangsters hot on their winning streaks from the racetrack. At night, Chester is a place where women wear very little very brazenly, where there's as much wealth on show as there is flesh. Often, the clothes are of the leopard skin variety, as bereft of ideas as the wearers are bereft of manners. Today, I'd just emerged from Waterstones (I'd found a Kliban Cat calendar dumped in the bargain bin for £1) and I was walking along the Rows, which if you don't know Chester, are a raised pedestrian area a level up from the street, forming a continuous walkway cut into fabric of the buildings. It's all carved timber like the innards of the Mary Rose, winding and rising and falling as the constantly unique architecture changes from shop to shop. It's probably one of the city's great attractions, the stuff that makes Americans boldly declare 'quaint'. Yet it's also extremely unfriendly for anybody infirm or pushing a pram. So, at one of the many old well-heeled stone steps you find at the end of the Rows, a woman was standing with a baby in a buggy. She was trying to figure out how to get her pram down the steep steps. I was a good distance away, so I knew somebody would stop and help before I got there. In a city like Liverpool -- supposedly a tough working class city but the reality is that it's about the friendliest city you'll find anywhere -- somebody would help her in an instant. Yet that didn't happen today in Chester. It was some time before I reached her yet I found her still struggling. I stopped and helped her carry the buggy down to the street and I say that not because I'm particularly virtuous because I'm not. But it's what you do when nobody else will stop and help and Chester doesn't feel like a place where people help each other very often.

People are rich and with wealth comes a certain attitude which pervades the place. In reminds me of London in the way that people shove each other out of the way, rarely signal for you to go first and instead take every space as if it's already their own. On my rare visits to London, I've felt like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, smiling at unfriendly strangers and apologising should I step in their way. Hold a door open for somebody in Manchester or Liverpool and people usually smile and say 'thank you'. Hold a door open for somebody in London (or Chester) and they assume you're there to hold the door open for them. It's not deliberate. Taking you for granted is a habit of mind.

The same unfriendliness is carried over into the shops. Chester is the only city where I've ever been physically thrown out of a bookshop. It was some years ago now. I was about to go back to university to study English and I was in the classics section of W.H. Smith. I remember I was trying to figure out which edition of Shakespeare's collected plays to buy. If you've ever studied Shakespeare seriously, you'd know it's an important decision not to be made quickly. A young assistant came up to me. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was browsing the books. 'They have libraries for that,' he replied.

'I'm sorry?'

'If you want to browse books, you should go to the library.'

'But I'm looking at these books intending to buy one.' I'd been stood there about five minutes and with student loan money in my pocket to buy my copy.

'Yes and we've had a lot of trouble with people like you...'

And then he escorted me out of the shop, despite my protests and requests to speak to the manager. I know I should have stood my ground but, also knowing Chester, I'd have probably ended up in the nick. I was too far from home to make a scene, plus, I guess, part of me felt like he was right. I didn't belong. A stinking letter to W.H. Smiths' head office did nothing. I suspect they'd mistaken me for somebody else. I never did find out. It was years before I even used that W.H. Smiths again.

Yet that's Chester. Despite the charm, there's a tricky undercurrent to the place. Walk the Rows and peer into the shops and you often see unfriendly faces looking back at you. Or, perhaps, just at me. I know the problem is partly how I look. I am shabby. I wear the clothes of my profession: lifelong student, writer, cartoonist, programmer, naive dreamer. And I know I dress a certain way because I want people to misjudge me because I also know that the suits and the tans mean very little in life. Or they mean very little to me. I want to be judged for who I am and not how I look. Yet the irony is that many of the shops contain the things I cherish. I now don't even bother trying to enter the few antiquarian bookshops. I stick to the charity shops. I don't enter the art galleries and I don't even go into the Cartoon Gallery, which is up on the Rows on Watergate Street. It should be one of my favourite places in the North West but I stopped visiting. Whenever I've gone in there in the past, I felt so out of place. Not that I've ever been made to feel out of place. The owners smile at me but I somehow know it's not for me. It's a shop made for golfing executives and their wives, not for would-be cartoonists only there to look at all the Bill Stott originals and, besides, Bill Stott gave me one of his originals. He's a good man. I suspect all cartoonist are, as I bet Albert is. Albert the Punch cartoonist who sits working at his desk at the back of the shop.

Yet I don't really know why I feel apart in the place I should feel most at home. Perhaps it makes me bitter to think that the guy there to buy an expensive cartoon for his den wall can't identify a Stott from a Bestie, a Mike Williams from a Bill Tidy.

And perhaps that's why I always leave Chester feeling disappointed. I know it's not really the city that disappoints me. I guess the disappointment is with myself. I realised this today.

We all go through life occasionally glimpsing lost souls, somehow outmaneuvered by fate. I saw a couple today, walking past me. They were obviously a couple and both wore glasses with extremely strong prescriptions. The boy looked cumbersome. The girl was attractive but in a slightly forlorn way and you know that she in no way would ever think herself attractive and you know that's one of life's small tragedies. She had a prettier face than many of those caked in fake tan and lip gloss. You might say the couple were a perfect match, each of them so ever slightly odd, and  that forced me to mutter a lament of 'poor buggers' as they walked past. Yet Chester also makes me realise that I'm another of the 'poor buggers', only there because my sister needed another hospital appointment because she continues to be extremely unwell, continually failed by the NHS, having just endured another six months of suffering because the local GP managed to lose two blood samples she'd given without informing us, meaning that, six months later, we had to face a consultant explaining how the important blood work hadn't been done and she'd have to do it again, involving another six month wait... Two poor buggers in Chester and never a lucky break between them.

And that, I suppose is the problem I have with Chester. Chester really makes me hate myself and makes me hate my life, which is unforgivable. I can't think of another place that ever makes me feel so utterly abject, glad to be home but also sad to be home. It's not simply the fraud of the history, the wilful ignorance of the people. It's the sense that life really is a lottery and some of us can afford the great suits, the expensive hotels, the bright red cars, the cartoon originals, the first editions, and, most of all, the private healthcare. The rest of us are stuck with shit luck, the NHS, and the knowledge that no matter how hard you work, how kind you are, how noble your dreams, or how generous your spirit, you can still be heeling along at the bottom wondering when life will give you a break.

'Antiqui colant antiquum dierum' is the City of Chester's motto. 'Let the ancients worship the ancient of days.'

As far as I'm concerned, the ancients are welcome to them.

Chester...

World Poetry Day

As you will no doubt know: it's World Poetry Day. I know. Exciting!

I woke up really energized by the prospect and I immediately logged onto the World Poetry Day website. Today is the day when we can exchange our poetry for coffee!

You might know that poetry is my secret shame. I spent years studying it in academia and though I don't read much modern verse (I'm more of a Shelley, Pope, Donne, Byron, Yeats, Stevens, Hughes man), I do occasionally write poems which I send to be rejected by poetry journals. I have a 100% record of having my poems rejected by literary journals and I'm extremely proud of the fact.

However, today was going to be different. Today my poetry would earn me something: a free cup of Joe! My bag was packed and I was ready to head to whichever cafe was participating in this clever scheme to bring poetry to the masses. Naturally, I expected to travel a little distance. Perhaps as much as twenty miles to find a place to get free coffee for my verse.

You might say I was a little disappointed when I saw the map.

200 sodding miles! That's how far I'd have to travel! 200 sodding miles!

So, here's a poem I'd picked out which I was going to donate to my local coffee shop. I wrote it a few years ago and I should warn you that it's rather powerful stuff. It deals with my love of coffee and the effect it has on my body. It's part of the Stan Archives and didn't make the cut of my finished book so I might as well post it here so it might live on. Donations for a cup of coffee gratefully accepted.

Ode to My Bladder by S. Madeley (poet)

After John Donne

Deceitful ounce of flesh! The trickster God called Bladder,
Always waits until I’m in a lift or perched atop a ladder,Or just when I’m dozing and Vanessa Feltz fills my dreams,Up or down I go, urged on by unreasonable streams;That Horlicks taken lastly with the ITN News at TenOr that early cup of Java meant to help renew my strength.Oh cursèd God called Bladder, unfaithful and cruel,You are the geriatric version of a Lord of Misrule.Why do I have a bladder small? Just who do I thank?Wish I for a leak-proof tap or suitably appendaged tank.

Not had you enough of my poetry? Well have a refill. It's my tribute to my cat.

On The Death of Sandhurst (Cat)

Goodbye Sandhurst, you were my favourite cat,
Born of the union of Miggles and Tabitha Black,
Who was a friend in her day, but nothing quite like you,
So placid since you were neutered at the tender age of two.
Oh, I’ll miss you, Sandhurst! There’s no doubt about that!
Sad it was to see you lying there, so round and so flat.
For five long weeks you were a constant source of worry.
Why did you cross the path of Asda’s refrigerated lorry?
I doubt I’ll love another, you really were unique;
But I’ve bought myself a kitten. I think I’ll name him Squeak.

The Asymmetry of Hugh Edwards

It was good to watch last night's 'This Week' since I'd been mildly annoyed at the BBC on Wednesday. Their Budget coverage was in all respects a typical 'Daily Politics' except they'd dropped Andrew Neil in favour of Hugh Edwards and I never really understand the point of Hugh Edwards.

Somebody inside the BBC clearly believes that Hugh is the new David, the old David (or previous Hugh) being David Dimbleby. It's not that I hold any particular grudge against Hugh but he doesn't have that devilish edge which elevates him above the mere average. His chief quality is an asymmetry which he does well but I've never really cared (literally) one way or the other about asymmetry. Nor have I ever been much of a fan of an Elvis lip. Hugh definitely has an Elvis lip, which he usually combines with his asymmetry to produce the Hugh Edwards effect, which makes women swoon and men wish they could swoon.

Perhaps the BBC think Andrew Neil lacks the glamour to front a national event and they replaced him with Hugh in order to satisfy their occasional viewers. News compulsives would be watching irrespective of the host but Hugh Edwards would calm the minds of those who occasionally dip their toes into politics, perhaps to see if a few pence would be knocked off the price of beer. An asymmetrical Elvis lip will always calm that kind of fear.

Hugh is also a safe pair of hands. His hands, I suspect, are as unlike Jeremy Clarkson's hands as you could possibly go without adding extra digits. I also think the BBC like Hugh because he's Welsh. I know that doesn't sound like a reason to hire a man but I suspect the BBC find ways to fulfil their regional quota without going the full dialect. Hugh is a bit Welsh but the kind of Welsh that doesn't have hair on his knuckles or become too impassioned if you speak English west of the Wrexham. The Welsh are a proud and sometimes fierce nation. I don't live all that far from the Welsh border and I know that their language dominates our public transport as far as Manchester (or 'Manceinion' as our local trains announce it) and beyond. Perhaps it's that proud sense of nationhood that the BBC fear. Hugh is Welsh enough to count without disturbing the marmalade brigade in Hertfordshire.

But, I digress. 'This Week' wasn't as feisty as last week's episode but probably a more solid show. The standout performances were by Nihal Arthanayake from the BBC Asian Network and the always wonderful Anne McElvoy. Abbot and Portillo were good but they're always good. I'm never quite sure where Portillo would sit on the Conservative spectrum but I more often than not find myself agreeing with him. Perhaps that's why he's no longer an MP. He's not ideological enough and has broadened his mind to the pleasures of common sense.

As is also usual with 'This Week', I usually zone out during the final ten minutes, which was this week dominated by another comedian with nothing particularly interesting to say and even less to say that was funny. I suspect it's just me but I've had other 'This Week' fans assure me that it's not. They need to think of a new format for the last ten minutes. I might have to give it some thought and summarise it in a letter... Perhaps Andrew Neil should consider more asymmetry and getting himself one of those Elvis lips.

Talking About Isis

There's 1,400 of my words over yonder about Isis and technology which I hope you'll go and read.

Here, I want to write something longer in a minute. In the meantime: the eclipse was a bit of a non-event. I was promised at least 90% coverage this far north but it barely got darker than a slightly dull day. I was hoping for birds falling out of trees and other portents of doom. This was the view seen through my slightly grubby window. I suppose I should really clean the buggers now it's officially spring...

A Long Hastily Written Defence of Jeremy Clarkson

So many things I could write about this morning, including this gloriously beautiful spring morning. The only downside to spring is that it's a sure sign that summer is looming and I despise summer with a passion. However, I'm trying to remain upbeat. It's sunny and cold: my favourite combination.

I could also write about the lamentable services provided by foreign web hosts. Without getting into too much detail, I've been moving a website for people I do occasional work for. The site is going to be hosted on a new server and the operation takes about three days. I had the nameservers changed last night, which is a bit like asking the Post Office to stop delivering mail to your old house and to forward it to your new house. In computer terms, it means asking the 'internet' to stop sending traffic to your old computer and send it to you new machine. Like moving house, just because traffic is going to a different destination, it doesn't mean that your old house no longer exists. Except, in this instance, it does. Some birdbrain at the old web hosting company decided that changing the name servers meant deleting everything from the old server, which amounts to a previously undocumented form of madness. During the migration process, parts of the world can still have the old address, meaning that emails are getting delivered to the old place. Normally, after the migration is finished, you pop over to the old server, collect any outstanding files, and upload them to the new place. This time, I can't. It also means a headache for me and my not looking forward to this gloriously sunny spring day. Say what you like about working in a global market but cheap does not always mean good. My experience of working with companies in some countries is that it would be easier just to put your valuable company data in a large bucket, pour paraffin over it and dance wildly around it waving a match.

Sigh. And now Word just crashed but thankful came back with this document still intact. I think it's going to be one of those days.

Speaking of World Stupidity, I've not spoken about Jeremy Clarkson but, really, I wish the whole ridiculous story would end. I've heard two suggestions in the past two days which make me go grey. The first is that the BBC are planning to offer the 'Top Gear' job to Stephen Fry. It's the kind of news you hear and there's no deep breath deep enough to allow you the oxygen needed to explain why it's such a bad idea.

Clarkson is a prat but anybody with eyes can see that he's deliberately a prat. About 80% of his shtick is just that. Watch the earliest episodes of 'Top Gear' and I think you'd be astonished at how he's changed. I know I was, having just watched the very first episode again. His voice is different(he was so damn posh), his manner is different. What you realise is that he has carefully crafted the character of the big prat who believes in certain things which might or might not be completely wrong. Clarkson is, effectively, 'Top Gear'. His humour is also mannered and very well honed. You know what Jeremy Clarkson will say. He uses the same comic tropes over and over until, frankly, you want to take them behind the shed and shoot them in the head with a Glock automatic. And, yes, that was a typical Clarkson trope. It's called hyperbole and hyperbole can be a lot of fun. In fact so much fun that if you do it too much, your head will explode.

It also doesn't bother me that he speaks to a large portion of the country who, frankly, aren't in tune with current BBC policy. I admit, I'm not in tune with current BBC policy. I also quite like 'Top Gear', though I occasionally go through periods when I don't watch it. Steve Coogan was correct when he criticised 'Top Gear' for their Mexican adventure. There they went too far and it was around that time that I stopped watching. However, I've drifted back and I've found the show has been much improved. Sometimes they still do go too far but, damn it, there should always been room for people to go a little too far. It's the nature of comedy. Similarly, the BBC take their license fee from the entire nation. Not just from those people who enjoy 'Strictly Come Dancing' and the 'Graham Norton Show'. I happen to dislike with a deep intensity both 'Strictly Come Dancing' and the 'Graham Norton Show'. Yet I also enjoy 'QI' but find my Stephen Fry tank is rarely far from brimming over. I really don't want any more of him. I definitely don't want him anywhere near 'Top Gear', which people seem to forget, brings more into the BBC than the BBC spend paying Clarkson all that so-called 'licence payer's money'. Also, even if he was costing the taxpayer, I'd rather pay Clarkson than about 100 other chancers I could point at on the BBC books... Cough. Winklewoman.

This is turning into an unstructured ramble but forgive me. I have time to write quickly. Haven't time to write anything shorter.

The other dumb suggestion (though it's not so dumb as it is essentially redundant) is to give the job to Alan Partridge.

On the face of it, it's not a bad idea. Except we'd be changing one largely fictional 'character' with another. The only difference is that every offensive thing that Partridge does is done with a sense of postmodern irony. I'd argue that the same is true of Clarkson but I suspect not everybody thinks it's an act. Yet that's the joy of 'Top Gear'. You never know how much of it is real or staged. One of their best episode was when they drove a hover van through Stratford Upon Avon. They seemed to upset people drinking on the banks of the river (the van threw spray everywhere) but it was impossible to tell if people's response was real or staged. What's more, it really doesn't matter. The bloody thing was fun and funny. If you don't like it, it's easy to turn off.

I think the main problem is that Clarkson is too successful (and good) at what he does. Too many people seem to think he's the character he plays. I don't believe he is. Take, for example, the way he writes for the Sunday Times and the way he writes for The Sun. You wouldn't think they're the same man. Yet even if he is that same man and he is, in the words of James May, 'a knob', then I really don't care. Also in the words of May: 'I quite like him'. That's about the most sensible thing that's been said about this whole stupid debacle.

Clearly, somebody at the BBC wants him out for political reason and, I'd surmise, Clarkson is bringing this long simmering argument to a deliberate boil. Well, sod it. I've written enough times about the right of people to enjoy the things that make them happy. If you enjoy watching three white middle age prats fool around with engines on a Sunday night, then that's also fine by me and most weeks I'll join you. Just don't force the 'Top Gear' three over to Sky where they will become year another fragment of our nation reduced to a pay-per-view basis. Not everybody who watches Top Gear is a UKipper but the very fact that many in the media suggest otherwise is precisely why UKip exists in the first place. Keeping Clarkson would show that we're actually comfortable with our sense of nationhood. Getting rid of him would, I think, show how bad things might have become.

The Problems of Drawing Bibi

After a questionable vegetable pizza early in the evening (something I rarely eat but, for once, made an exception when one was offered), I spent the rest of last Tuesday night in the company of my growling guts which didn't put me in the mood to be funny. I instead found myself doodling the above picture of Benjamin Netanyahu and Mitch McConnell and contemplating the thorny problem of anti-Semitism and, in particular, the even thornier problem of George Galloway.

I drew last week's Galloway cartoon entirely tongue in cheek. For what it's worth, I find Galloway as entertaining a presence on the British political stage as I also find him a somewhat creepy and fairly repulsive comedic turn. Occasionally I find myself agreeing with him but more often than not I think he's plain wrong. Yet he's often wrong in a very convincing way. He argues in favour of the underdog (which is honourable) but often does so by praising vile extremists who just happen to side with the underdog. He is rhetorically gifted but the rhetoric is often in the service of the wrong camp. He claims to be on the side of the angels but too often keeps the company of devils.

Despite all of that, I don't consider Galloway to be an anti-Semite, though perhaps you'd expect me to say that given that he's currently suing a number of Twitter users who suggested otherwise. 'Anti-Semite' is an unfortunate term which is thrown around too easily given that it historically has a looser meaning that many would wish or want to admit. Although the term 'anti-Semite' is generally accepted as a term meaning 'hatred of Jews', the word 'Semite' can also refer to people of Arab descent.

Yet even if the term didn't have this slight doubleness, it still wouldn't mean that Galloway is in any way an anti-Semite. He's clearly not. Galloway is too much of a political animal. He thinks in terms of politics and argues in terms of politics; politics that often blind him to larger truths. Galloway is anti-Zionist, which is where the problem really lies. Many inside Israel believe that Zionism is itself integral to the Jewish identity. It's at the very core of their belief and so, they would argue, to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic. That's why the Question Time studio a few weeks ago was filled with so many angry voices shouting Galloway down. It's the same as you see in America, with Jon Stewart only last week accused of being anti-Israel simply because he didn't agree with the policies of their government.

The whole debate is deeply divisive, nuanced to hell and back, and for that reason, that's as far as my thinking, knowledge and (frankly) my interest takes me. The semantics of language becomes as unhelpful as unpicking the history of those troubled lands. They both lead you deeper into the political mire and provide no helpful way of turning away from all the brutality and hatred. All I'll say is that from the perspective of somebody without Jewish roots, from a good distance away, and with no political allegiance to either side, I feel great sympathy for both sides. It disgusts me when Hezbollah fire missiles into Israel but it also saddens me to see the plight of people inside Gaza. Finding common ground between the two sides is, I fear, an impossibility given that both have claims to that 'common ground' based on ownership, political treaties, religious texts and untold amount of blood already spilt.

What I did want to write about was the problem of drawing satirical cartoons, particularly caricatures, around these hostilities without falling foul of people who search for offence. Watching Peter Brookes' interview on the Times+ the other night, I was surprised when he expressed a concern that has been troubling me. For Brookes, the problem was drawing Obama. He was concerned about drawing features which could lead him to be accused of racism. It's a very difficult area. Offence is so easily taken and extremely hard to avoid in every instance.

Cartooning without any offence is impossible in the sense that offence is often taken when none was intended to be given. When Gerald Scarfe drew his now infamous picture of Netanyahu building a wall in which Palestinians were trapped inside blood coloured cement, he was accused of deliberately repeating the 'blood libel' which (justifiably) offends many people of Jewish descent. Now, I hadn't myself heard about the 'blood libel' until the controversy occurred. However, I know that Scarfe is particularly fond of the colour red and blood features heavily in many of his cartoons. You only have to see his bloody Blair or baboon Bush standing beneath a US flag dripping with blood (both, below) to realise that the Netanyahu skit is a relatively mild one. What's more, I know as a cartoonist how my own mind would work and I know that had I the talent to come up with that image of innocents trapped inside a wall of Netanyahu's building, it would have seemed sensible to make the cement red. That is just what you'd do when drawing a cartoon to attack the Israeli Prime Minister.

In a sense, the Scarfe Conundrum is one all cartoonists face when they sit down to draw a cartoon that attacks a strongly help political or cultural viewpoint. Yet even inside Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is a divisive figure and satire has an important part to play in commenting on divisive figures. All a cartoonist can do is to the best of their ability avoid the tropes that will cause the most offence. Cartoonists won't always know enough history or have enough cultural sensitivity to recognise the perils but there's a whole literature on 'reader response' theory to explain why that will always be the case.

However, what interested me the other night was how simply trying to draw Netanyahu led me to some difficult problems.

Type 'Netanyahu cartoons' into Google and you get an interesting selection of cartoons of which (I would argue) Scarfe's example is still the greatest and most potent. However, the majority of the cartoon are not in any sense 'good'. With perhaps the exception of one example penned by the genius hand of Brookes, the majority of the Netanyahu cartoons don't attempt to caricature him. They instead choose to draw him, which is something else entirely. I'd challenge you to type in the name of any other world leader followed by 'cartoon' and see how many of the cartoons contain caricatures. There will, naturally, be many that are more illustrative than grotesque but not to any great degree. Why is that? It Netanyahu particularly hard to lampoon or just too easy to draw accurately?

I'm not sure which it is but I'm willing to hesitate a guess based on my own approach. When I started, I felt deeply self-conscious that I didn't want to draw anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. I felt that not because I was afraid that people would take offence at this blog. I'm simply too unknown and unimportant for anybody to get upset by anything I do unless, of course, I insult Harry Potter and then all hell is unleashed upon me. I simply didn't want to draw anything that could be construed as anti-Semitic because I would hate anybody to think of me in that way. Last week, I simply wanted to draw a cartoon that simply expressed my thoughts about Netanyahu's hawkish speech to the US Congress.

So how would you draw Netanyahu without falling foul of accusations of anti-Jewish propaganda? Any guidebook to caricature tells you certain established rules, such as exaggerating a person's most obvious feature. That is difficult when that person has features that are strongly indicative of their nationality.

I phrase that carefully. Here I have to talk about racial stereotypes which are, I think we would agree, a bad thing. However, if you study any amount of critical theory based around Structuralism, you would  know that certain elements crop up repeatedly in human history. If you look at the myths of most civilisations, even civilisations so remote and ancient that they could not have communicated with each other, you will find, for example, myths involving gods made to suffer at the tops of trees or placed upon crosses. Certain myths are deeply rooted in our identity as human beings. Bad guys commonly wear black because we, as a species, are a species who operate in the day and generally fear the night. I used to bang my head against tables so many times when teaching structuralism to undergraduates because, at least once a semester, one would self-importantly declare 'I think it's wrong that Darth Vader is dressed in black because I personally consider that racist'.

It's an easy, lazy, but understandable leap of logic to wrongly equate the cultural trope of 'black=evil' to the struggling emergence of a multicultural society. We have to be more sophisticated in our thinking and to recognise that there is a telling difference.

The same is true when dealing with caricature. For example, I'd suggest cartoonists have to be careful when drawing Netanyahu's nose but, at the same time, can't ignore it. He has a great nose, full of character but cultural sensitivities mean that you have to draw it in a way that doesn't remind the viewer of anti-Semitic tropes. It's at the root of my defence of Scarfe, who admirably managed to pull Netanyahu's face apart and reconstruct it in a way that bears absolutely no similarity to anti-Jewish propaganda. Yet that's a difficult trick to accomplish. Just a twitch of the pen at the wrong point and you are liable to offend.

The fact that people can be offended so easily is, I guess, an expression of how deep the hurt and how long lasting the suspicions. It's too easy to say 'no offence was intended' because anybody with the wits to see should realise they are walking a path through a battlefield where too many lost their lives. Yet that doesn't mean that cartoonists shouldn't try. The problem is we quickly find ourselves defending the indefensible. How, for example, can I write 1400 words explaining why I'm cautious about drawing a picture of Bibi Netanyahu but I would defend the right of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists to draw the Prophet Mohammed?

The answer, I could speculate, is one of prohibition. Yet no sooner have I written that than I realise that it's simply not true. Scarfe was not expressively forbidden from drawing a 'blood libel' cartoon, even if that was what he drew. Yet when he did, he was widely criticised and even Rupert Murdoch apologised. So, with hindsight, we realise that it is forbidden and rightly forbidden. So why don't we share the same cultural sensitivity to Mohammed?

Some would argue that there's a form of doublethink going on. We believe in the absolute freedom of expression except when that expression is forbidden by some but not by others. Yet I don't believe that's true. The most essential difference is the difference between mocking a belief and mocking a people. It's where all this navel gazing began. It's right to mock Netanyahu for what he believes; it's right to mock his person; it's not right to his family, his, nation or his people. Ideas and individuals are the rightful objects of our scorn. Anything beyond that should rightly remain taboo.

On Martin Honeysett

Christ, I feel like I'm down with a cold. My head feels heavy and my ears feel full. Last night's sleep was rotten too. I had a programmer's sleep which you might know about but you might be lucky enough to have never programmed a computer in your life. If you ever do much coding late at night (and that's always been my habit), it's often followed by a sleep in which your whole dream feels like it's trapped inside DO...WHILE loops. The entire thing might be about something else but it's set to the structure of computer logic. You wake up feeling more exhausted than when you went to sleep.

Last night, I couldn't stop dreaming about glue sniffing vicars, which, if you know your Punch cartoons, was one of the best ever drawn by Martin Honeysett. Cartooning was on my mind because it was late last night that I read that he'd died just a few weeks ago aged 71.

Honeysett was one of the Punch regulars who had become a staple of Private Eye but his style remained that of a better age of cartooning. His pictures remained beautifully crafted whilst others became more measly. As a cartoonist with a nice pile of rejected cartoons from Private Eye, I suppose it's only natural for me to sometimes pick it that fortnight's edition and think 'mine were better than that'. Yet I never ever thought that when looking at a Honeysett cartoon. He made me realise how far I still need to go.

In that way, a Honesett cartoon always stood apart on the page and was immediately recognisable by the mixture of oddly shaped men in huge bulbous suits and the lovingly drawn details. His lines were sublime, his figures like those of Searle but warped by a Steadman filter. They were the kind of cartoons I can stare at for hours on end. They draw you into the gag, rather than encourage you snort once and then move on. They also stood apart because of the density of ink on the page. It was a style that also reminded me a little of Ed Koren, who draws for The New Yorker. Yet Honeysett's humour was far darker, admirably twisted, and of a Britain that exists best (and perhaps only now exists at all) in cartoon form. Cartooning has genuinely lost another of the greats.

Speaking of great cartoonists, The Times have an excellent video talk (1 hour 22 minutes no less) in the company of Peter Brookes. The video is for subscribers only (and thankfully, I know a subscriber) so I watched it over the weekend. Highly recommended. Brookes makes everything look so damn easy, especially to bad cartoonists.

Speaking of bad cartoonists, I've been deep in programming. I've (hopefully) nearly finished the little project I've been working on for a friend. I've not done much drawing over the weekend, except for my hastily drawn Putin cartoon, late Sunday night. I've been adding quite a few features to my Gag Machine which I might put into an update if I'm satisfied they work without problems. I'm going to try to write more this week. It's too easy to find reasons not to blog and then, before you know it, there is no blog. So, I'll try to write more, even when I don't feel like writing, even when I feel like I need my ears syringing. Even when I'm coming down with a cold.

Putin's Back

Review: This Week (12/03/2015)

This Week* remains, for me, the best show on TV. The current brouhaha about Clarkson would pale compared to my reaction should Andrew Neil ever receive the BBC poleaxe. The virtue of the show is that it's rarely about policy. The various issues of political debate are rarely highlighted as much as the debate itself. The show is really about the meat and bones of Westminster: the personalities, the strategic calculations, and the great machinations of state.

The show is at its best, as it was last night, when the nasty underbelly of politics is exposed and tickled. This week, that nastiness arrived in the form of Michael Gove's wife, Sarah Vine, who also happens to be a Daily Mail columnist with a particularly vile line in acid. Both Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson attacked her strongly for the astonishingly vicious piece she recently wrote about Ed Miliband's wife. If anything, their visible anger didn't go far enough but what we had was a riveting exchange and a highlight of my week.

If This Week has a failing, however, it's always the final segment when they try to broaden the appeal of the show by inviting somebody from outside the political sphere to contribute to the debate. It's often some uber hip member of a reality TV show or the saxophonist from a 1970s supergroup who has since moved into organic truffles. Last night it was an astonishingly irritating nineteen year old who swaggered into the studio with an attitude that wouldn't be out of place in a prime ministerial address to the nation. It wasn't just the nascent sideburns struggling to stretch from his ears to somewhere beneath his puppy fat chin. Nor was it the black cravat he was wearing. It was the sheer banality of his views that made me sit up and wonder how the hell Tyger Drew Honey has come to the producer's attention. He proceeded to give the 'yoof' view of social issues and offered such a bland summary of life's problems that it would only endorse a view that people under twenty one don't really know enough about anything to have an 'opinion'. Yet, good guys to the last, both Portillo and Johnson patronised him with their favourable words. He was 'opening their eyes' to issues but, really, had they not been aware of those issues, then you'd question their place on the sofa.

'Tyger' came out with, frankly, feeble nonsense such as 'I know a lot of adults think that kids have the intelligence not to do these things, but I think that's ridiculous because put yourself in the position when you were a teenager, when you knew something was wrong, you'd still try to get away with it'. That wasn't true when I was a teenager and it's no longer true now. Yet, I guess, I can't speak for everybody. He then proceeded with this gem. 'I think we need to think about educating moreso the adults in the above generations as to what precautions you can put in place to actually stop my generation from being able to do certain things, on the internet especially'.

In other words, parents should keep any eye on what their children are doing and watching. Astonishing. Quite the novel idea. Not sure where I've heard it before...

It is only with hindsight that his words become particularly ironic and are the reason I'm writing this now. Wondering who the hell I was watching, I went onto the internet to research 'Tyger Drew Honey' and to understand why the producers of This Week thought his views should matter. I didn't have to look far. Thankfully, Wikipedia has all the answers. It all begins here:

Drew-Honey was born in Epsom, Surrey, the son of pornographic actor and director Simon James Honey and adult actress Linzi Drew.

Following the father's link, takes you to:

Simon James Honey (born 23 May 1956 in Sittingbourne, Kent), better known as Ben Dover, is an English pornographic actor, director and producer

Follow the mother's link, you discover she was:

'a Page 3 girl, stripper, glamour model and porn actress and was at one time the editor of the British edition of Penthouse magazine'.

She was also, incidentally, on the cover of Roger Water's excellent album, 'The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking', a cover designed by Gerald Scarfe.

I know the sins of the father aren't those of the son but I find it telling that in the supposedly egalitarian society of modern Britain, it's the son of the man who made 'Ben Dover's British Anal Invasion' (1997) and 'Ben Dover's Soccer Sluts' (2003) who is sitting on TW's sofa telling us that it's the older generation who should be our moral watchdogs. By the looks of things, it's his elders who have largely contributed to the moral degradation of our society, earning a small fortune in the process and funding his education at Epsom College (Patron H.M. The Queen) where fees range from £7,335 to £10,730 a term, a privileged start to life which has now helped launch him into a career in TV punditry.

You couldn't make this stuff up and, as great a show as it is, it makes me wonder what kind of researchers are working on This Week. Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo, and Alan Johnson deserves better because, last night, knowing what I now know, their responses looked mildly ludicrous to a Tyger who did not burn particularly bright.

* That's right. The title of the show is 'This Week'. Anybody who'd call it 'The Week in Politics' clearly doesn't know what they're talking about. However, it's an easy mistake to make. There are so many of them: The Daily Politics, The Sunday Politics, Strictly Come Politics With Andrew Neil. It's easy to get confused...

eBay

Looking at it from the cold end, today resembles a total waste of my time.

I've been asked by a friend to help with a little eBay project they're working on. I said I'd take a look at the eBay API and see if I could connect to it. After an initial moment of panic and my walking/running away (the eBay system is so archaic that barely any link, tutorial, or page still works) I came back and found some useful sample code. After about an hour of work I'd managed to figure out how to connect to the sandbox and I'd started to exchange data. That should have been the hardest part. From there, I started to build a new interface. However, some time after 4pm, the eBay sandbox went down. Not that there's a status page to say as much. There's not even a proper developer's forum where such things can be discussed. I'm now at the point where I might just abandon this as a bad idea.

For a company as big as eBay, the situation for developers is frankly appalling. It's like they've made their money and don't really care if others can write code that can communicate with their system. It's been an absolute waste of a day; a day that I could have otherwise spent on other work. I have three new cartoons which will become another batch to submit to a magazine. I'm trying to create one batch of cartoons a week but two if possible. This will be my second if I get draw another cartoon tonight, which I will if eBay don't fix their sandbox.

Meanwhile, in server hell: my site keeps disappearing when I'm not looking. I think it's a memory issue, even through I've moved up to a 1Gb server. I won't be moving higher so I have to figure out the problem or resign myself to rebooting the server every few days.

How Has Adam Savage Customised His Toilet?

I've become about as obsessed with Tested.com as a man can get without actually buying a subscription. Not that I wouldn't buy a subscription but life isn't exactly great at the moment and 'cash' and 'surplus' are words fitted with opposing neodymium magnets. I just can't get the little buggers to stick together.

Yet even as a non-premium member, I confess that I'm utterly addicted. Never before have I found a website which is so like an electrified needle pushed straight into my man-lobe, should there be one and I have no doubt that somewhere deep in my brainbox there is such a lobe controlling my love of manly things.

I have no idea how Tested.com came into existence. My devote atheism denies a role for divine inspiration but, without that, I can't believe evolution would produce something so perfect. Tested is a place for makers (that is, people who make things). I'm not a maker myself in the sense that the things that I do make aren't anything other than digital, or occasionally, ink and paper. However, I'm fascinated by people who are.

I think it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that if I had to name the greatest human being currently living on this great soggy globe of ours, I'd probably name Adam Savage. Savage, for those of you who haven't been enlightened, is the more talkative host of Mythbusters but he's also one of the stars (maybe *the* star) of Tested.com. He describes himself as 'a maker of things' but that really doesn't do him justice. He's really King Nerd, the guy the rest of the world should really look up to instead of all the grifting shysters and semi-evolved rappers. Savage lives his life in the zone that people like me just consider home.

Example the first: he's just build a replica of the maze that Jack Nicholson looks over at the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's Shining. The videos that accompany that build are just manna for anybody like me who loves Kubrick. (Speaking of which, I highly recommend, if you can find it online, Jon Ronson's excellent documentary about Kubrick's boxes.)

Take, another example: Savage's current obsession with flying drones.

I've written before about my concerns about drones but I'll admit right now that the more I see what they can do, the more the bloody things excite me. I know now that I'll never own one or get to fly one but that doesn't mean I can't live vicariously through those people that do. But even my sheer excitement about new technology is different to the joy I get from watching Savage work. When body augmentation kicks in, I expect Savage to lead the field replacing his buttocks with something more functional and contain compartments to keep his wood glue. Until that day arrives, I'm satisfied watching him making all manner of things for his new toys. His 'One Day Builds' on Youtube are worthy of any TV station and, I'd say, are better than 95% of the stuff on the BBC. If they had a 9pm slot on BBC2, they'd become a worldwide hit. They're simply that good. They're an example of what intelligent people can do when given the resources and the freedom not to chase profit.

Whenever I complain about the degradation of society and culture, I should really parenthesise all that and say that in some ennobled places in the world, culture is still on the rise. Noe Valley in San Francisco seems to be one such place. It's where Tested.com has its home and where Savage brings order to the chaos. His has to be some highly evolved form of autism: a delight in order and arrangement. Yet it's more than that. What excites me about Tested.com is that the thing is so damn friendly. It makes you feel that human beings aren't so bad when they can work as a community to share a passion. I can't recommend it enough.

Having said all that, in his latest video, Savage and Norm (Norm's great) look at the tools and gadgets that help Adam fly his drone. Just the attention to detail is something I admire. Yet the attention to detail didn't go so far as shutting the bathroom door behind them.

First thing to note: Savage keeps his toilet seat up. Of course, that's the way to go from a practical point of view but perhaps this is a small detail which distinguishes the amateur operation from the seriously professional. However, in the absence of Jeremy Clarkson from our TV screens, this is the next best thing men are going to get to 'manly TV' for a little while. I tried not to look into the bathroom but I did begin to wonder about what is in there. If Adam Savage likes to customise everything in his life, how the hell might he have customised his toilet?

I've been giving this far too much thought and I now believe that the first thing I'd do is to counter-weight the toilet seat. I've often wondered about that before today. Why should it be the obligation of men to put the seat down? Shouldn't it be the obligation of women to leave the seat up? Or solve the problem entirely with a simple weighted solution to make toilet seats like seats you find in a cinema.

But knowing Savage, I suspect a counter-weighted toilet seat wouldn't be enough. I can only conclude that he has magnets on his flies and that there's some kind of floating truss in there which connects quickly to his lower regions. The truss takes care of the handling leaving his hands free to do more valuable things such as spray paint a model or drill some MDF. I thought I also spied a foot mechanism to control the flush but I might be wrong. All I know is that the possibilities are endless. Perhaps it will be a future video. If so, I'll be hooked. In the meantime: feed your inner nerd and check out Tested.com.

Does The Internet Have A Phillip Schofield Filter?

Yesterday was a bad day for reasons I can't really go into. Things happened to somebody very close to me but they're not my grievances to air. All I can say is: kids, if you're watching, don't believe anybody who tells you that life is fair and that hard work is rewarded. It took me far too many years to learn this hard lesson. In fact, if I could rewind my life and give my young self some good advice, it would be this:

Be shrewd and calculating in everything you do. Play the system. Remember that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Be devious and deceitful if you can get away with it. The rest of the time simply keep your mouth shut. Never express an honest opinion. Opinions can come back to hurt you later. Never devote yourself to being good at your work. Push for promotion even if that means hurting the people around you. There are no friends in business. There are just competitors. Keep on the good side of the people above you and make sure that they owe you favours. People beneath you are simply beneath you. Treat them accordingly. Life rewards you if you're a cruel bastard. Knowledge is worth nothing unless you can use it to harm a competitor. Above all know that the only thing that is worth anything is power. Seek power and wield is ruthlessly. And should the people at the top ever realise that you're bad at your job, a cruel and bitter tyrant, make sure you have enough dirt on them that they can only get rid of you by paying you off generously.

Hmm... That sounds depressing cynical but it's genuinely how I see the world. I know I'm not the only one who sees it that way. All the talk in the newspapers about the state of the economy, our hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, police departments, legal system... All of it is meaningless waffle. The truth is that we have a system that widely promotes fools over people good at their job. The system rewards failures. It rewards people who are shrewd enough to play the system. The result is a system that fails us on every front.

I guess that's why I've worked hard to keep myself out of that environment. Despite my cynicism, I'm an idealist but I wouldn't last ten minutes. Mine would be flesh that simply snarls up the gears for a few moments before spitting me out. I don't know how other people do it. Everywhere I look, it seems that witless sycophants persevere. People of quality, depth or personality are made abject; the system shaming them into silence.

For example, I see this morning that the deeply cretinous Phillip Schofield has been mouthing off again. Is there any greater symbol of the national mediocrity than Schofield? Singularly without a talent other than his personability, he is a smiling shill of a human being. He's merely the bland filler between advertising opportunities. I'd consider it a shameful way to live a life; creating nothing other than opportunities for corporations to exert control over the masses. Take, for example, the way he's been defending 'This Morning' after viewers complained about the feature they did about S&M a few weeks ago.

“Obviously I’m not saying the bondage is going to save anyone’s life but what we did was reflect on what everyone else was doing or talking about at the time.

“Everyone went to see the movie and if you look at the stuff we had on there, it was very innocent stuff and also spectacularly when the item had finished the things we had were all sold out in moments.

“So behind those closed, outraged doors of middle England, what they were secretly doing was going to buy this stuff online.”

He's right, of course, except for a couple of very slight flaws in his argument.

1. Not everybody was doing or talking about it at the time. The way he talks about this is truly staggering. He's portraying it as though they were covering a sudden fad for a new type of biscuit. What he's talking about is sadomasochistic sex being heavily marketed by companies who cared about nothing other than making money. Just because a horrible film based on an equally horrible novel is made, doesn't not mean that everybody is our there sticking butt plugs up each other's arseholes. If you want to do that, then that's fine. Just don't be so hypocritical about it.


2. Not everyone went to see the movie. I never want to see the movie. If you want to watch porn, you should be more honest about it and watch something properly erotic. Not something that hints at something you're too uptight to genuinely look at.


3. Nipple clamps are innocent stuff only if the same is true of any other S&M sex toy.


4. Just because you advertised products on one of the nation's main TV channels, to an audience of millions, many of whom are illiterate dopes with more money than sense, it's obvious that whatever shit you're selling would be sold out in moments. It's not proof of your moral righteousness. It's simply the business of large numbers.


5. I'm not of middle England. I wasn't secretly buying this stuff online. I thought the show was vile.

Sigh. I give up. Sometimes it's not worth arguing. The world is beyond reason. One blog doesn't make any difference compared to the hundreds of millions spent in advertising stupidity to the world.

 

On Soup, Steadman and Skills

Monday and a post of a few odds and one barely functioning sod. It's noon and I fear that somebody spiked my coffee with a sedative. The caffeine has still not kicked in. I blame the weather. After a few days spent enjoying some early spring weather, the skies have turned an underpant grey. It's also cold which makes my blood run like soup.

However, trying to rouse myself: I have a new cartoon over at Tim Marshall's new blog, The What and the Why, and a new cartoon here today if I can shake life into myself and get it finished. Or perhaps not if I finish it and like it enough to include in today's magazine submissions. I've been spending a few days trying to collect together all the stray cartoons I've drawn. I have another batch ready to send out.

I was chuffed this morning to see that one of the rare Ralph Steadman newsletters had landed in my inbox. The master is finishing another book of 'boids', which I have to admit, isn't really my cup of tea. As much as I love simply everything that Steadman does, his 'boids' have never really floated my boat. I never bought the first book and I don't see myself buying the second. I think it's really the subject matter. I love Steadman's human figures, those wide eyed loons and tendril fingered deviants. Birds, to me, are just splashes of paint and a step too far into the world of the abstract. It's why I'm pinning my hopes on the news that he's working on a new book called 'The Book of Clever Bastards'. The title sounds promising. I just hope the clever bastards are human clever bastards and not a book about devious plants or ingenious insects.

I had a strange weekend. One of the unlooked-for advantages of honing my programming skills is that my new programming skills can be used for odd jobs. A close friend had a problem uploading data to a website because the data she had was in the wrong format. I said I might be able to help, thinking I could write a little bit of code to input the bad XML and output good XML. It took me about an hour but result worked and my friend was so happy the she had me quickly balloon the app with features. I now face a day when I'll be adding more. Did I say programming was an advantage? Not sure it is. It's the story of my life. All I ever want to do is draw and write and the only thing that life wants out of me is cold rational code.

Post Hobbit Thoughts

Stephen's comment this morning got me thinking about 'The Hobbit'. I recently saw the third part of the trilogy and, though I didn't think it the best of the three, I did think it a fitting end to both the adaptation and Peter Jackson's long sojourn in Middle Earth. I say that having not always been so positive in my thinking. When I first heard about a new big budget version of the 'Lord of the Rings', I felt a mild disappointment. I knew Tolkien would become bigger and even more popular, whereas previously, I knew very few people who'd read the books. I'd read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion at school and had given a small presentation about it to a class who clearly thought I'd gone mad trying to explain the attraction of hobbits and orcs. I'd loved the Radio 4 adaptation of the Rings and also quite enjoyed Ralph Bakshi's animated version, though he'd only made the first half of the trilogy with a hastily tacked on ending completing the story. My main disappointment with Jackson's films was that John Hurt didn't play Strider. Strider was my favourite character but made special because of Hurt's voice and the gnarly version of the Son of Arathorn in the Bakshi version. Despite so many obvious improvements in other respects, Jackson's Strider was never that good.

Yet given those doubts, I loved Jackson's Rings trilogy as I now love Jackson's Hobbit trilogy. In fact, perhaps I've enjoyed the Hobbit more since my expectations were lower and they've raised the source material and given it a more adult tone.

I know I'm one of a minority who think that way but I think it's hard to be balanced when there's been so much mildly warmed crap written about 'The Hobbit'. I accept I was as cynical as most when I heard that they were turning the relatively slim book into three movies, each the best part of three hours to enjoy. Yet it has worked really wonderfully. Somebody had perceptively recognised early on that the book breaks down quite evenly into three sections and that each section ends with a strong third act. The only reason the third film didn't feel so compelling as the first two was that 'The Battle of the Five Armies' was the only one that didn't end with the underdogs fleeing an overwhelming force (the Orcs of the Misty Mountains in part 1, the elves of Mirkwood and then more orcs in Part 2).

There were, of course, some horribly bad decisions along the way. Stephen Fry gave one of his better performances as the Master of Laketown but that didn't deflect from the problem that it was still Stephen bloody Fry in yet again in a big budget film. When will filmmakers realise that he's simply too big a personality to fit into any role? Thank Christ he's not (as yet) in the new Star Wars movies. I go cold at the thought of his mellow tones coming out from behind a Wookiee mask. The same was true (but to an even more galling degree) when the dwarf legions appeared on the hills of Erebor in Part 3. As the dwarves celebrate the arrival of the reinforcements, their leader rides forward. That was Dain Ironfoot or, as we prefer to call him, Billy Connolly. It completely broke my immersion in the film and I wasn't the only one. 'Oh bloody hell,' I heard at least one person mutter.

The overall sense of the films is one of gratitude. They've made me again fall in love with Middle Earth and, particularly, the Middle Earth I love: the only that lies just beyond the familiar stories and names. If it's at all possible, it's that Middle Earth that exists with a history as yet untold.

Clearing Out Old Cartoons

Another of my unfinished cartoons which are finished enough to post here but not finished enough to send out. There's much wrong with this: the hands need redrawing, the ground needs more shading and particles of dirt. The joke is okay but nothing special. Better to clear it from my folder and move on.

Boom Beach is eating my soul...

I'm not convinced that so called 'free to play' games should be legal, though I guess there's no rule in the world that stops bright folk playing us for saps.

I've been addicted to 'Boom Beach' since the day I bought my Samsung Note. It's supposedly a strategy game in which you build a small army which you can use to conquer islands overrun by computer generated force or forces controlled by other players. What's become obvious over the time I've been playing it is that there's actually very little strategy other than the psychological strategy of the creators who have a deep knowledge of what motivates human beings.



I've been playing it for months and I'm now at level 46, my HQ at level 16. That will mean nothing to you unless you play 'Boom Beach' but, to put that into context, the highest players in the world are around level 60+. What's more significant is that I've played it without spending a penny.

Money is a big element in the game. I read somewhere recently that 'Boom Beach' earns the makers hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every day. The money comes from players buying 'diamonds' which are the most powerful currency in the game. You'll notice that all these supposedly 'free-to-play' games require a virtual currency. In some games it's gems and in others it's coins. In 'Boom Beach' it's diamonds and diamonds allow you speed things up because without diamonds, everything takes an eternity to complete.

That delay is a powerful motivation. The psychology of delayed gratification is a strong one, as the best writers often prove. If you've ever read 'Lord of the Rings', you'll notice that Tolkien interleaves three narratives through the final half of the book. It's a brilliant technique which means that he can delay the gratification of giving you a vital piece of plot for the next but two chapters. He does this at the end of nearly every chapter, meaning you're always left on a hook.

The same is true of these games. As you level up, you feel more motivated to carry on and yet the goals become harder to achieve. Or, that is, harder to achieve without paying. In the course of a week, I can earn about 100 free diamonds by simply playing the game. However, I could buy diamonds which cost £3.99 for 500 or £79.99 for 14,000. I don't, of course, but lots of people do. 14,000 diamonds would allow me to level up my base (the game's single most important unit) at least three more times. As it currently stands, I'd probably have to play it for 140 weeks to get that far. That's nearly three years.

Without buying diamonds, you get stuck like I'm currently stuck. Every day, I try to get my resources (wood, stone, metal) to a level where I can upgrade my base. Every day, I'm raided by players and I lose all my resources. I often wonder how many of those players have paid the £79.99. It's been going on for months now and I'm at the point where I wonder why I keep going.

The reason I keep going, I suppose, is because I've already invested time into the game. Once somebody is locked in a pattern of behaviour, it's hard for them to break out of it. I'm locked into a pattern of behaviour. I need to quit now and spend that time reading a book or going for a walk because I should realise that at an elevated level, the mathematics of the game have already been carefully modelled by very bright people who also understand human psychology. The game, like so many others of the same type, is bright and cheerful and you feel like you're having fun playing it. Yet it's also unbeatable. There is no goal other than the goal of making me return to it and (had I cash) encouraging me to pay money for a completely virtual reward. More than that, it reveals how easy it is to manipulate people, break their free will and turn them into drones. Deep down, the whole culture of these games is very sinister. It reveals the mean truth of consumerism. The system tempts us, flatters us, sweetens us, courts us, romances us, but in the end, it only really wants to consume us entirely.

 

A Cartoon Not Fit For Anywhere Else

Going through my folder of the cartoons I've drawn in the last fortnight I'm removing all the chaff. This is chaff. I like the idea. I don't like the execution, though, in truth, I probably haven't even finished it. It was probably something I drew quickly thinking I'd go back and draw it properly. However, it's not worth throwing any time into it. It's the kind of cartoon I like drawing but no bugger would ever think to buy.

Milk, Ford, Cartoons.

Yesterday was one of those 'bad' days summed up by my going to Tesco to buy some milk, only to find myself standing outside five minutes with a woman tapping on my shoulder.

'Oh,' she said. 'It's you'.

'It is me,' I replied, thinking that finally somebody has recognised me my by witty turn of phrase or the way I famously wear my trousers baggy. I've been blogging and writing years so it would great if somebody finally recognised me.

'Yes,' she said. 'I've been following you around Tesco...'

'Ah,' I thought, 'a stalker too... Wonderful.'

'... around Tesco mopping up the milk you've been trailing.' She pointed to my feet. Sure enough, they were covered by the white stuff.

'Oh Christ,' I muttered and immediately inspected my rucksack which was also leaking milk. Milk was everywhere. Milk was down my coat, the back of my trousers, trailing down the path, through the automatic doors, and into the show where I could see the polished shine of the newly mopped floor.

That was the kind of day I had. Nothing went right for me from problems on the Mac, problems getting paid for the job I do (problems, believe it or not, with the Nigerian elections mean that, across the globe, I'm still waiting to be paid). There were problems galore, great and small. And then, later in the evening, I heard reports that Harrison Ford has been critically injured in a plane crash.

I don't believe there are any real film stars remaining in the world except for Harrison Ford. I'm a huge fan of Ford because he's not Hollywood. He seems to share my outlook on life and is realistically difficult to get on with. I also like him not because of Star Wars or Indiana Jones. I love the so called 'lesser' films. I love the Blade Runner, Air Force One, K19: The Windowmaker (great under-looked movie), The Mosquito Coast (truly great novel too), Witness, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Fugitive... I adore Frantic for reasons to long to go into. Even my favourite Indiana Jones movie is the one not cited as the best: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Movies just don't get better than the Ford/Connery combo. Just a day ago, I was cheering because Ford had agreed to start in the Blade Runner sequel.

Thankfully, it seems he's battered but okay. But that news came early in a new day. Yesterday was behind me.

Today: I'd like to post my piece about caricature, finish writing my app that automates the process of submitting cartoons to magazines. I've also got about 10 new cartoons to submit and I need to organise them properly and do some last minute cleaning up before I caption them. I'd also like to get The Gag Machine properly working for OSX. I also need to head out to Tesco again. Need more milk.

I Hate Hate Hate Hate Macs

It's take me two afternoons to remember why I absolutely bloody loathe Macs. I've been allowed access to one just to get my software running under OSX. The process is simple. I run this command:

mono thegagmachine.exe

Simple. Mono is the miracle software which turns my Windows program into something that runs under OSX (or, incidentally, Linux).

What's not so simple is getting that working from a simple command.

There's supposedly a simply way of embedding everything into an 'app'. An app on Mac OSX looks like an icon but is really a directory. If you right click on many 'apps', you can ask to see their package contents, which are a number of directories containing all the files, graphics and other resource files. There's also a 'simple' way of telling the Mac to run a script inside that directory structure when you double click on the icon.

So, in theory: I create the directory structure. I tell the package to run 'launch' when it's been opened. 'Launch' is just a script containing 'mono thegagmachine.exe'.

And that'it. And what's more amazing is that it worked. Wonderful!

However, I needed to update my bundle (that's what you call this .app directory structure) with a newer version of my Windows exe file. So I duplicate the gag.app (which, remember is just a directory). In the copy, I replaced my exe file. Should be simple. When I double click on the script inside the .app structure, everything runs. So I guess the script is correct.

Only, when I click on the main icon, I now get nothing. Just a momentary bouncing icon and nothing more.

Two afternoons it's taken me and I seem to be getting further from the solution.

I hate Macs. Beautiful machines but even doing the simplest thing takes hours of research and a damn lot of luck.

 

Bibi and Mitch

A Forced Blogpost

I'm finding it hard to muster the enthusiasm to blog, though the writing comes easy. Yesterday I wrote a longish essay about the politics of caricature which is so long that I haven't the time to polish it and get my words just right. Yet it's not just time I lack. I have two cartoons I've drawn but can't find the enthusiasm to frame, caption and post. It's incentive I'm missing. I sometimes feel like if I got hit by a bus, the blog would continue on for one month before my webhost would delete it. And it and I would pass into oblivion with barely anybody noticing. I see the traffic arrive for people wanting tips of pen cleaning or Unity programming or 'how to submit cartoons to Private Eye'. But they all pass by, my advice given but rarely a 'thank you' or 'have a nice day' left. It's the way of the world, they say, but it's not the way of my world.

Yep. Feeling a bit sorry for myself today. Feel like I need a bit of a boost. A little bit of luck. Some damn feedback for all my efforts.

I spent yesterday converting my Gag Machine for Mac OSX. I expected the conversion process to be hell but was pleasantly surprised at how easy that was. I was also surprised how much of it I could do on my PC before I had to take it to the Mac given that I've only got very limited access to one of those Supreme Beings.

It's all done via the beauty of Mono, which if you're technically minded is a development framework which mimics the operation of Microsoft's .Net framework but under the Mac operating system. If you're not technically minded, it's just powerful mojo that makes magic happen. The result is a programme that looks fairly close to the Windows version and has all the same functionality. I might put it live today. I might not. I don't suppose it really matters.

The Weasel and the Woodpecker

So far this week, I've drawn about three cartoons and written a Windows program to record all my cartoon submissions. Not that I've submitted many this week -- four or five went to The Spectator yesterday -- but the program is central to my vow to take my cartooning more seriously. My problem is that I've never been much of a 'submitter' and, as they say, you have to play the game to stand a chance of winning a prize.

When the program is completely finished, I might upload it here for free for anybody who might want to use it but even as I type that I have my monetary angel is banging his head against my right shoulder as if to tell me to stop being so damn generous. But, frankly, I don't think there are enough cartoonists or writers in the world who would want to buy it or even would find a need for it. The main reason I've written it is to also help archive my cartoons. I lose too many to computer glitches that I'm trying to make more use of online storage. So, every time I finish a cartoon, I add it to the database which archives a copy to Dropbox. With all my cartoons listed, I can (for the moment 'in theory') simply click a button and generate an email based on the publisher details I've already entered and with the cartoons embedded into the email.

When it's finished, I might give it away, might keep it for myself or I'll ask a few dollars for a copy and stick it over on The Digital Nib. Unlike my previous program, The Gag Machine, this isn't a long term project. It's more of a useful tool I needed and realised I could program in a day. And I did program its basic functionality inside a day. I was writing it when my laptop died on Sunday.

The loss of the laptop has be surprisingly hard. The faded/yellowed/'cooked' label on the back would say I've had the laptop about four years but for about three of those years, I've not switched it on for fear that it would burn out. However, since my writing my 'review' and claiming that I'd never use it again, I'd started to use a thermal cooler beneath the laptop. It didn't do a great deal but it did make it usable for short periods. With a slightly cooler lap, I'd started to use the laptop at least once a day and I'd got it just how I wanted it. I was programming more. Writing more. And then, within about two weeks, it has died with an inevitable smell of burnt solder. It died exactly how it died the first time it blew its video card. I now hate Dell with a passion. That laptop cost me so much to buy, thinking that buying from the XPS range would make it a long term laptop, only to have it now burn out twice. Only this time I've not asked for a repair. I'm not investing another penny into that machine or that company. The XPS 1340 was a horrible machine that should never have gone to market.

I should really get a new (non-Dell) laptop but they're so damn pricey and my attempts to monetise the blog have come to naught. I started my new drive to earn from blogging on the 4th February. It's now the 3rd of March and in one month I've managed to raise a whopping £1.06. That's £1.06 reward for 12 cartoons, 2 Photoshops and 21,000 words. Okay, that's not one of my most productive months but it's surely worth more than £1.06.

I'm not pleading poverty here (though, perhaps, I guess I am) but this is a example of the new internet economy in which the big guys make millions while the rest of us scramble around to earn pennies. The reality is probably that I should really blog less and devote my time to selling my cartoons or my software. It's galling that I think that but even more galling that my past efforts have come to naught. Take this morning's cartoon as an example. If I type 'George Galloway cartoon' into Google, one of mine appears at the top of the search results. That's even before you go into Google image search.

That's really weird and yet deeply satisfying.

The three other cartoons are by heroes of mine: Peter Brookes and Martin Rowson. My cartoon (below top) was drawn years ago when I was first starting out. I don't think it's anywhere as good as today's (below bottom) Galloway cartoon which, I hope, is not as good as the next one I draw.

Yet the cartoon is there. Multiply all those years of effort and count up the many hundreds of cartoons I've drawn, hundreds of thousands of words (I once calculated millions for all the blogs I've written), all of which is still online: and all I have to show for that this month is £1.06.

Forgive me if I sound cynical about the internet. The truth, for me at least, is that I draw a cartoon which hardly anybody looks at whilst Twitter is today dominated by a picture of a woodpecker carrying a weasel on its back. And if a woodpecker carrying a weasel isn't a metaphor for the great democratization of media production then I don't know what is.

A George Galloway Cartoon

The Same Old

I leapt out of bed this morning. New day. New week. A new month. New resolutions and a new determination to 'do something'. That 'something' was to submit some cartoons I've been drawing over the last week or so. I had a 'good lead' in the form of an email address. So, I'd specifically drawn cartoons that would appeal to my lead. What can I say? It was the right market for these cartoons and I've been focused on doing the best I could.

So, this morning: final clean up on the cartoons. Nicely captioned. Then packed into a PDF. Email written. Just about to paste the email address into the bar and I thought... Better just check that the email is still current. So I did a quick check.

The person no longer works for the publication.

Damn.

So, I began to search for their successor. After about half an hour, I made the breakthrough and I had their name. A new name for the old job of cartoon editor. However, despite another hour long search, I could not find a single email address. So, as it stands, I have five really nice cartoons into which I've poured my body and soul, yet I don't have a place to send them.

All that talk about 'newness' suddenly feels so dumb. I'm stuck back in the old rut where my enthusiasms quickly run dry.

On a more positive note: I mean to blog more this week but, today, I'll be running around doing about a dozen jobs.

Laptop

Well it died. That's why I'm posting this from my tablet and hating every moment of typing with predictive tits.

NEWSREADER BUY DELL. I mean that to say 'never' but damp predictive tits changes everything I write. Anyway, the  laptop was running hot as I tried to use it for a little coding. Written a nice little programme or was doing until something began to smell of bumming. BUMMING? I hate predictive text. Burning. Bud I get.  Burning.  Burns v.  Burton I get. Can never type the same world twice. It smelt of bur ING

Dawn.  I tried to type "damn".

Dan. 

Dan.

Just ridiculous.  What would my blog be if I wrote in on here?