Rocks Around And Thinks That He's The Toughest

When I'm not pondering the big issues of the day (see below), I suppose it's fair to say that I move in better circles, lead a more exciting life, and breathe in a more rarefied atmosphere than you do. There's no point pretending otherwise. Men want to be me, women want to be with me.

And yet, every now and then, even I feel pangs of jealousy for the achievements of another. Any of you who have read this blog for a long time will know that I have one great unfulfilled (and never to be fulfilled) ambition.

So imagine the horror when a friend casually mentioned to me the other night that her brother is going to compete in Beijing at the Olympics. How dare he? It is I, Papmeister, who longs to be an Olympian! His sister, let's call her Alex, didn't seem sufficiently excited about it for my liking. He is going to be an Olympian! Someone should tell her what it means. I would have, but I found myself temporarily struck dumb with vague feelings of envy and hatred. 

Even worse, he isn't competing for his country of birth but for another after this country deemed him not good enough to get into our team at his chosen sport.

Surely there is a small country, somewhere in the world, that would accept me as a team member in a sport where they have no representation. All genuine offers will be considered.

Posted by: papmeister at 16:10 | link | comments (2)

It's tempting, and reasonably justified, to think that anyone who writes a blog is pretty much wrapped up in themselves. And I think in my case, at certain times, this has been the case. It's not an attractive facet of my personality but I hope that it's not a major part of my character...it's just that at those moments when one is feeling rather more self-obsessed than usual, then the blog is a bit of an outlet for my adolescent ego.

So I thought you'd like to know that I'm more usually engaged with the world outside myself; that I think about other things than the minutiae of my own existence. And there are a few things exercising me at the moment that I'd like to mention. Two massive bees in my bonnet, as it were.

The first is something that has always horrified me. It would fall under "man's inhumanity to man". I just can't get my head around the concept of torturing another living person. I don't understand how someone could arrive at a point in their lives where they could hurt someone else, repeatedly, deliberately, slowly, in order to extract information or a confession.  There's very little point in my repeating things on here about the rights and wrongs of torture - if you're a decent human it is always wrong and if you are not then nothing that anyone says will change your mind. But if you haven't read about waterboarding - this process that the Bush administration believes does not constitute torture - then please read the following short extract describing the process:

Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, publicly denounced the practice. He revealed that waterboarding is used in training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in San Diego, and claimed to have witnessed and supervised "hundreds" of waterboarding exercises. Although these last only a few minutes and take place under medical supervision, he concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique – period".

The practice involves strapping the person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim's mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process of slow-motion suffocation.

Typically, a victim goes into hysterics on the board as water fills his lungs. "How much the victim is to drown," Mr Nance wrote in an article for the Small Wars Journal, "depends on the desired result and the obstinacy of the subject.

"A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience to horrific, suffocating punishment, to the final death spiral. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch."

Now think about the version of waterboarding that is practised on those who are not on the same side.

And the second thing that is driving me nuts? Well, first of all, I have to explain why it is driving me nuts. It's because it isn't getting the media coverage that it warrants. I think the following story, in Europe at least, should be leading the news every night.

In Rome, they now have a fascist mayor. They also have a Prime Minister who gets into bed with the Northern League, who are of a similarly right-wing outlook. Anyway, after weeks of raiding gypsy camps in and around Rome, a new piece of legislation has come in. All Roma (gypsies) are to be fingerprinted, including their children "to avoid phenomena such as begging" according to Interior Minister Roberto Maroni.

Why don't they just make them wear something to identify themselves? I don't know, maybe a brown triangle perhaps.

Posted by: papmeister at 23:15 | link | comments (6)

After a hard day working for the BBC, take the train on the commute home (read The Guardian, don't meet anyone's eyes), walk from the station through the leafy suburbs to your detatched house in Altrincham, uncork a fruity and impudent red and slip Leonard Cohen onto the CD player while you wait for your wife to serve up some exciting and challenging nouvelle cuisine.

Yes, I went to see Leonard Cohen last night. And I have never been at a gig that was so middle-aged and middle-class.

First off, I want to admit that the gig was truly excellent. "I haven't been onstage for 15 years. I was 60 then. Just a kid with a crazy dream....."

But I couldn't help wondering whether Cohen's songs of twisted and broken love, occasional glances to the seamier side of life, allowed these very respectable looking people to vicariously feel some frisson of edgy living. None of them looked like their real life was a nasty and bloody fucking mess.

So naturally I felt a bit lonely.

Posted by: papmeister at 10:10 | link | comments (5)

I disappeared again.
I'm terribly unreliable.
Anyway, so, what I've been doing? Well, I was trying to extricate myself from jury duty, for one thing. Please understand me, it’s not just that I don’t believe that all's equal and that the courts are on the level and that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded, or just because I feel that it isn’t true that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom. But this played a part. So I told the courts my concerns. And it would seem that I’m not the sort of person they want deciding the fate of the accused.
I have mentioned to a couple of people that I have no desire to sit on a jury and, to my surprise, this amazes them. Apparently sitting on a jury is some people’s idea of a great way to spend their time. As if deciding whether someone would go to jail or not is like a TV reality show. One person even said to me that they would love to do it and they would find the defendant guilty no matter what. Because, obviously, if they’ve been arrested then they must have done it. Or done something. Anything. Take them down! Throw away the keys!
It seems to me that every person I’ve met who wants to do jury service is also in favour of the death penalty. And I wonder whether jury service, in their minds, has nothing to do with the sober reflection upon the facts as presented, and more to do with exacting some sort of vicious revenge on the world, making someone pay for all the shit that happens in the world. They can’t stop it all, but they can’t take someone down with them.
And this is the other half of the reason that I can’t do jury service. I may be locked away in a room, deliberating with people who hold views like this. And I can be an intemperate man, given these sorts of circumstances. The walk from jury room to courtroom, from juror to defendant, could end up being one of the shorter walks I take this year.

Posted by: papmeister at 23:03 | link | comments (3)

This is not a football blog and so I apologise for referring to it again but it's an important time of the year for those of us who are addicted.

First of all, last night it was the European Champions League final, for the first time ever contested by two English teams. And played in Moscow. Anyway....the game actually turned out to be a great one, unusually for games when there is so much at stake. But a lot of my pleasure derived from people-watching during the game. I watched it with about seven other people and enjoyed basking in the glow of their irrational hatreds which made me feel better about my own. I also enjoyed how my two Serbian friends occasionally reverted to Serbian when talking about certain players. They obviously could find no English language sufficiently harsh to vent their bile.

And tonight (I am deliberately writing this before the games, so I am in a state of unease) my team play and if they win they will almost certainly win the league, barring something weird and illegal going on at Pittodrie when Aberdeen host the forces of darkness. Those wishing to guage my mood later on, would do well to look at the football scores.

Finally, I went to visit my son on Tuesday. He was telling me that he's started going to mass. I asked him about it and what aspects of it he enjoyed. He said he liked the hymns but that he'd never heard any of them before so when he was handed the hymnsheet with their words he just made up his own tunes, which hung dischordantly in the air, at odds with the tunes everyone else was singing. But then he said something which I thought was the very essence of a Christian outlook on life:

"I don't sing any more. I was fucking up the vibe."

Posted by: papmeister at 18:22 | link | comments (1)

So, yeah. Things I did while I was missing in action.

Well, I wrote a lot.

And I made a few good friends along the way.

I chose not to grow a beard.

 

Posted by: papmeister at 23:40 | link | comments (5)

You all know me as a fun, laid-back, peaceloving beatnik. "Hey, there goes Paps! Probably on his way to plant some flowers in the barrels of rifles. Or maybe hug a tree." I know that a lot of you picture me composing these few simple words bedecked in a tie-dyed kaftan, chanting "om" and reeking of incense. So it will come as something of a shock to hear that I have my bete-noire, something that I hate with a violent passion that makes me froth at the mouth, direct vitriol at passers-by, scowl at babies and mutter obscenities at little old ladies on their way to church.

What could possibly do this to me?

I'll tell you. It is ostensibly a football club. But really it is the worldwide headquarters for the forces of darkness, of negativity, of anti-football, of anti-joy, of anti-life. So heinous are these "people" that I was unable to watch them on my television for fear that, heaven forfend, they would be victorious and therefore damn us all. I did, however, place several Friends of Paps (FOPs) on standby to text me if it looked as though they were going to lose and it was safe to turn on my television.

And therefore I would like to say a massive thank you to Zenit St Petersburg for restoring order to the universe last evening.  At least to my part of it.

Posted by: papmeister at 19:18 | link | comments (2)

Paplings. Loose in the countryside! Lock your doors!

Posted by: papmeister at 01:28 | link | comments (2)

The weather here has been unusually good for just over a week. Bruce Springsteen would be singing about girls dressed in their summer clothes if he were here. He isn't though.

Those of you who know me will know that I am the proverbial "all-night drug-prowling wolf, who looks so sick in the sun" (albeit minus the drugs these days) and would be surprised to hear that I was on a beach recently. And not because I had been washed up like so much flotsam and jetsam. No. I was on a beach, with Thing 1 and Thing 2. Kicking a ball around. And the like.

I looked in the mirror this morning. I am now a slightly "off-white" colour. It won't last.

 

Posted by: papmeister at 15:55 | link | comments (3)

I have been away for a week. Although, as someone pointed out, I have also been away for 500 days.

A week. It's not long, is it?

But I saw the sea, and I smelt the sea, and I tasted the sea and when I slept I dreamt the sea, like I do so often. And this time I dreamt of sailing above it instead of willingly sinking below its welcoming mass.

Don't tell anyone but I think I may have rejoined the human race.

Posted by: papmeister at 20:33 | link | comments