Dave Shilson 1977 - 2022

 

No doubt Dave would have been amused by the fact that his passing coincided with a period of national mourning, though there may have been some annoyance that the TV schedules hadn't been disrupted for him.

Not that he would have expected quite the same coverage as that given to the late monarch – on that Thursday evening GB News appeared to be showing something called The Queen Dies, every hour on the hour, as if they were forcing her to do it again and again. I'm sure Dave would have been content with a few rerun episodes of Spaced, or Time Team – on Dave, of course.

A lot of my memories from being his housemate in five houses over seven years seem to centre around the TV, and the no-doubt-hilarious commentary we provided on offerings such as Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men or Ghosthunting With The Happy Mondays. We could have been on Gogglebox if that had existed at the time, and they'd let us.

Our tastes were at odds to some degree (he hated Abba, I hated Queen) but some programmes, like Flight of the Conchords, TV Burp or Bellamy's People (which I doubt if anybody else remembers) we both liked, although I now feel a bit guilty at the thought of how many hours of Coronation Street, and Deal Or No Deal I must have made him sit through (or 'shared with him', as they say nowadays). Although he always had his laptop open as a defence against whatever was on.

Confronted with some new trash TV atrocity I often wonder what Dave – or the audience that comprised Dave and I – would have made of it, and now I will have to go on wondering. Of course, with the advent of TOWIE, whose epicentre was Brentwood, TV soon merged with our 'reality', but Dave preferred the more authentic Essex experience offered by places like Jaywick, an unapologetic shithole. Though in the end that got on TV too.

By that stage, he had left Essex. It was easy to understand and approve of his relocation to Malvern with Claire. Malvern seemed as he described it like a place especially imagined for him, with an endless supply of real ale, feral Morrismen, and hobbits hiding in the hills (to be glimpsed only after quaffing large quantities of the ale). I don't think Claire even had a TV. He should have had longer there, but that he had the time he had is something we have to be grateful for.

Not that I want to sell the Essex years short. There was plenty of incident: post-rave air base mash-ups, ambient experiences in the secret nuclear bunker, flea infestations, the Pink Toothbrush, the Coming of Ross. But it is the routine, and rituals like the consumption of two bottles of good red wine every Friday night, that stick in the mind.

Much of it is recorded, somewhat fitfully, on this blog, which I have been attempting to reread. Dave rarely commented on a post, and when he did it was characteristically laconic. 'But still', he writes on one occasion, a reference to the concern I had expressed that I was overusing this particular phrase.

Looking for words of wisdom from Dave on here I could only come up with (in relation to a preference for hotel vending machine snacks over fast food): 'You can't get dysentery from a Yorkie' and (advice to Mat, who was struggling to reach something): 'You need to be taller.'

Hardly adequate as a summing-up of a life, if such a thing were possible or even desirable (his 'last words' online – 'could be worse' - seemed to do that more effectively). But still.

The Last of England

So at last it came: Brexit Day! Some celebrated and some commiserated but the overall feeling as far as I could tell – and this seemed to be confirmed by the tone of that 'official slogan' about 'getting Brexit done' – was of something unpleasant and possibly embarrassing that had to be got out of the way, like cleaning up after an explosive shit.

On the other hand the Daily Mail was offering its readers a commemorative tea towel, depicting some white cliffs. If it doesn't work out like you hoped, you can throw yourself off them.

Up until this point Brexit has been a maggot writhing around in its supporters' insides, inflaming their imaginations – now that it has been spewed out into reality and lies there on the sidewalk in glistening lumps it may not look so appetizing. But we'll all have to lick it up anyway.

Our latest PM (essentially, Mr. Blobby pretending to be Winston Churchill) doesn't exactly look like he's going to be much help. His 'landslide' victory was like the Trump story repeating itself as farce. And it already was farce.

Politicians should be grey and boring if you ask me – they are, after all, just civil servants. These celebrity politicians aren't really cut out for public service. It's all about me is their first principle, shortly followed by: It's not my fault.

It's a stance that has a certain logic to it. Because if you vote for people whose self-serving nature, incompetence and lies are all apparent from the start, you can hardly claim you weren't warned. Thus their consciences are clear - or would be if they had them.

It has at least been amusing to see the Daily Mail's headline writers trying to make Boris sound more dynamic than he is. 'PM Jets In To Face Iran Crisis' – as if he was going to cycle back from the Caribbean - then, next day: 'PM Walks Tightrope Over Iran'.

The other week the Mail On Sunday, inaugurating a litter-picking campaign, pictured him next to a womble (Orinoco, I think) as if he might look credible in comparison – in fact, it was hard to tell them apart, let alone decide who would make the better statesman.

His election victory seems, to a large extent, to be a reaction to an opposition putting forward a more radical agenda than anyone had the stomach for. And I suppose it didn't help that Corbyn tripped the Anti-Semitism Alarm. Once this is set off, it is very hard to stop – indeed, any polite request to 'turn it down a bit' is automatically interpreted as further Anti-Semitism, causing it to be turned up a notch. In the end, you can't hear yourself think.

It's hard to tell but I suspect that Boris, however long he survives, will be at best the new Cameron (a dead donkey) and at worst the new Trump (a livid prick, spouting shit). He even has his own Steve (Hilton or Bannon, take your pick) in the form of Dominic Cummings, who has advertised for 'weirdoes' to help Boris govern. I've already applied, calling myself Bonkers McConkers and suggesting that the Queen be replaced with a pineapple and that terrorism should be ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED. I've heard nothing back and am beginning to wonder if Mr. Cummings had a more specific definition of 'weirdoes' than he made apparent.

Still, it's reassuring that we can leave Europe and still be in Europe geographically. It means I can leave England myself now without the bother of actually going anywhere – and there really is nowhere to go anyway.

Not, of course, that I was ever really here in the first place.

Attack of the Giant Baby

To be honest I’m trying hard to ignore Donald Dick, at least until the bombs start falling. I am trying to access a state of mind wherein his pronouncements are of no more significance to me than the wailing of a baby in a distant room - which is not so far from the truth when you think about it.

He is an endlessly needy creature, a flimsy container for a black hole of narcissism, which must by its very nature drag everything into it, or die.

To be fair, a baby does have the excuse of being completely helpless; Donald Dick is at the other end of the scale in this regard. It is we who are helpless.

I know I am. In spite of my resolution, I have to look and I have to listen. I mean, what’s this? Here he is claiming that many more people attended his inauguration than did Obama’s even though everyone can see that they didn’t.

This wail of frustrated neediness must perforce be conveyed to the world  through words, necessitating the appearance of Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who – in order to translate it into a language the assembled hacks might understand – has to resort to the use of ‘alternative facts’. It’s as though these might lead to a full-blown alternative reality, one in which Dick is a real dictator, not just a half-assed one – because, of course, a real dictator could have ensured that those crowds were actually there, even if he had to pay them.

(Or those crowds might have turned up voluntarily I suppose – but even in a universe of endless possibilities, that one does seem remote.)

Or perhaps Dick is just having a laugh. He’s probably seen Veep, wants to know how it will play out in real life. Whatever, the important thing is that Dick is being himself, whether that self is a yapping dog, crying child, or cackling imbecile.

When Dick talks about the ‘dishonest’ media he seems to imply that he himself is ‘honest’, but his idea of honesty does not relate to facts, it relates to emotions. It’s an American tradition, expressing yourself, not bottling everything up, and one which Dick is wholeheartedly in favour of, as long as the emotions being expressed are his.

His ultimate goal, I would suggest, is not just to express his emotions but to enforce them on the world, a goal perhaps best achieved through the use of nuclear devices, for which he displays a childlike enthusiasm.

In this way the black hole inside him will be able to reverse its trajectory and become for a brief moment a blazing star once again as it obliterates the real world and all its inconvenient truths.

Would things have been any better under Hitlery Klingon? I doubt it. Maybe it's just the difference between finding the killing of a child 'justifiable' and actively exulting in it. 'Why the Hell not?' - it could be Donald Dick's catchphrase. But make no mistake, Hell will be unleashed – just in an alternative reality, if we’re lucky.

The Fandango Farrago

Who is Noel Fandango?

Once upon a time this was clear, or rather it was at least comfortably fuzzy.

Noel Fandango was a representative of ‘ordinary decent people’ who were sick of being sneered at by ‘elites’ who thought that they were cleverer than them, and ran the world accordingly.

Fortunately these ‘elites’, assuming that they ever existed, have now been overcome by ‘the will of the people’, after an astonishing revolution that has completely overturned the system we live in even though the system we live in is still later-than-you-think-capitalism, and as such fundamentally unchanged.

Once upon a time, ‘clever elites’ might have pointed out a contradiction in the above statements. Fortunately, we have now entered a realm of dream logic, in which what seem to be mutually exclusive propositions may both be absolutely valid.

This is a very exciting time to be alive. And if people find it hard to negotiate this new world they only have to turn for reassurance to Noel Fandango, who presents us with the face of ‘an ordinary bloke’, ‘just like us’ who talks ‘common sense’ which everybody can understand.

Noel Fandango is like one of those people who knows he could run the country very successfully if he wanted to, but instead wisely confines himself to backseat driving, demanding why that thing ‘the will of the people’ wanted hasn’t happened yet. ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Why aren’t we there yet?’, he says. Over and over again.

The underlying implication being, of course, that if we don’t arrive at ‘the sunlit uplands’ soon he will have to take the wheel himself, and then everything will be fine. Even though he has never driven before.

However, let it not be said that Noel Fandango has done nothing. Hasn’t he already proved his usefulness by cementing a relationship with Mr. Donald Dick of America? Donald Dick also likes to impersonate an ordinary person - or possibly many different ordinary people simultaneously - by spouting all kinds of rubbish based on whatever is going through his head at the time. Which is all very refreshing.

But Donald Dick’s assurances to Noel Fandango, whatever they might be, are surely to be taken seriously. Why, he has even suggested in one of his famous twitterings that Noel Fandango would ‘make a great UK ambassador’ even though he hasn’t been to Ambassador School and there is no vacancy for an ambassador currently.

But who the Hell cares about that?, as Donald Dick might say. Hell, why not make him King?

The Royal Family are just another ‘elite’ aren’t they? Everyone hates ‘elites’ nowadays.

Why not replace the Queen with an ‘ordinary bloke’? Even if, in the famous picture of Noel Fandango in a gold-plated lift (or ‘elevator’) with his new best friend Donald Dick, he doesn’t look much like an ordinary bloke at all.

Come to think of it, he looks very odd, like a cross between Cesar Romero’s Joker from the original Batman TV series and a duck. It is as if his grin might get so large that it will split his face entirely, leaving nothing to relate to at all. What has happened?

Perhaps, to use a well-known American phrase, what has happened is that in ‘crossing the pond’ Noel Fandango has ‘jumped the shark’.

This phrase, a reference to a scene in the television programme Happy Days, refers to the moment where a popular TV series reaches a point where it begins to caricature itself, and starts to lose its appeal.

Noel Fandango unthinkingly celebrates the connection between his success and that of Donald Dick, but many of his supporters are made uneasy by Dick. What seems like ‘a triumph for ordinary decent people’ in the UK can so easily look, when transferred to America, like ‘the lunatics are taking over the asylum’.

Fortunately in our new dream world Noel Fandango’s supporters are no longer obliged to follow their thoughts through to a logical conclusion. This is how Noel Fandango can simultaneously occupy the position of one who has ‘jumped the shark’ and one who is swimming with the shark.

Let’s hope it doesn’t eat him.

here we go backwards

A lot of people were shocked that Mr. Thump won the US election, which surprised me, as he was one of only two candidates in the race, and thus more likely to win it than anybody else in the world - apart from the other one, obviously.

But I suppose it is surprising that he could do so by ignoring the golden rule of campaigning: pretend not to be an asshole.

Most candidates feel obliged to kiss babies, but throughout his campaign Crump (as I remember) was either groping them or having them taken outside and shot - possibly both. Unapologetic assholery seems to have won the day.

It’s a hard position to criticise and harder still to mock. Many jokes were made and none were able to stop him. It’s as if humour, as a way of destabilising authority, has become redundant. When Mr. Bump appoints someone called ‘Mad Dog’ as his Defence Secretary his message is clear: I’m making the jokes now.

The only thing is, they aren’t funny. Still, you have to laugh.

Recently, someone published a book called Why Dump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. Its pages are blank.

Yet its content is surprisingly incisive. It tells us that, with his contradictory statements and blatantly unrealistic promises Mr. Stump has, almost skilfully, manouevered us to a point beyond language.

The perceived politically-correct ‘policing’ of language has made those who seem to ‘say what they think’ and ‘tell it like it is’ into perceived truth-tellers. Of course, if Mr. Pump were really to ‘tell it like it is’, he would have to preface each statement he makes with: ‘I’m lying.’ And then we are already plunged into a linguistic crisis – if he says he’s lying does that mean he’s really telling the truth?

The truth is, it doesn't matter.

Mr. Jump is known as an entrepreneur but far more importantly than that he is a celebrity. Celebrity, as we know, is not about skill or talent. It is not about what one can give to the world.

It is about using the world to affirm one’s existing personality: it is about self-expression.

Thus, the importance of any statement Mr. Lump makes lies not in what it says, but in the fact that he was the one who said it.

Each statement is an individual product of Mr. Gump’s celebrity mind, to be marvelled at separately. It does not necessarily have to tie in with any of the other statements. It does not necessarily have to ‘make sense’. That all of these statements emerged from the same organic source, now the world’s most powerful celebrity, is their entire justification.

This is why Twitter is the perfect vehicle for Mr. Hump, with every statement becoming an event for people to react to, separately. Social media in general has helped with Mr. Rump’s possibly-unwitting project to destroy language. There is, simply, too much language going on. Employed, on the instant, without due care and attention, it starts to lose its meaning. It softens.

In this context it is understandable that Mr. Slump feels no need to sculpt his statements into works of art. They are not polished or perfected. They are more like lumps of organic matter ejected from the celebrity orifice, into our sphere, where eager scavengers soon fall upon them.

If there is any sculpting to do that is a job that can be left to the world. Illegal immigrants, if there are any left, might be willing to wade into these lumps, like turds from a giant dog’s arse, and struggle to excavate ‘content’ from them. But it seems like a waste of time. There will be another one along in a minute. This matter is not in short supply.

The important thing to remember is that this is not language – it’s dogshit. And yet, it is dogshit from the Top Dog. Someone will have to do something about it.

In time, who knows, roses may grow from it. But for now perhaps our only option is to turn away, from the dog’s arse to its mouth, assuming that it is still possible to distinguish between these features. Here we may uncover an opportunity to develop a method of classifying Mr. Sump’s statements by measuring their tone.

For example, his statements might be divided into:

Excited yapping (no likely real-world implication; safe to ignore)

Playful growling (probably safe to ignore, but monitor)

Angry barking (at least pretend to take notice)

This is a work in progress, but hopefully will eventually furnish us with a way of responding to Nump now that human language is becoming redundant – many of his supporters will already be fluent in this method of communication, even as high-minded liberals may not hear it at all. Going forward, we will learn from each other.

As for humour, it should be remembered that philosophers like Henri Bergson have seen laughter as a kind of ‘civilized snarl’.

So that, at any rate, is still with us. The snarl, if not necessarily civilization. 

brexapocalypse

Well I've pretty much given up on trying to do justice to Brexit in writing. The complexity of the subject is such that only by means of my forthcoming 4-hour atonal jazz opera, Brexit Strategy, can I really say everything I need to say. The principal parts will be taken by rabbits, except for Andrea Leadsom (or Anthea Lederhosen as she is known in this), who will be a spiny anteater.

Mind you there was another piece of art that has already crystallized Brexit for me, and that was a sculpture called Walk a Mile In Her Veil created by Yasmeen Sabri, a student at the Royal College of Art. Intended to 'promote tolerance and understanding', it consisted of a burka over a wire frame into which the viewer could climb in order to experience life inside this garment. It had absolutely nothing to do with Brexit until an elderly drunk woman, a few days after the referendum, attacked it shouting: 'We voted to take our country back!'

The artist was quite upset at the damage done but maybe she should have been pleased to see how a rather bland sculpture had evolved into a one-off piece of performance art with real dynamism and contemporary relevance. That the piece had no relation to the EU at all somehow only made it all the more perfect. The drunken woman was called Mikaela Haze, which doesn't sound terribly English, does it? (A bit like Farage - though shouldn't that be pronounced 'Farridge' like 'garage'?)

I have said that Brexit was a 'wake-up call' but on reflection it might turn out to be whatever the opposite of that is. It could represent the removal of that unexceptional brick that proves to have been holding the entire structure up all along. It was like the British were regarded as the sensible ones in the world, and now that they've gone and done something a little crazy it has encouraged everyone with some mad ambition they've been brooding on for years to go out and do it, whether it's slitting a vicar's throat in France or exterminating the disabled in Japan or, in the case of Donald Trump, just, well, carrying on.

Trump's ability to bypass the logic circuits of voters and appeal to the reptilian hindbrain seems likely to bear fruit, but then the Americans like to do dumb things now and then so they can make films about them later. I'm still not entirely convinced that Trump is serious though – wasn't there was a conspiracy theory that he's secretly in league with Hilary Clinton? If so, maybe the joke has taken on a life of its own, as in The Producers. Springtime for Hitler indeed.

No Future

How long before interesting times get boring? Boris Johnson appeared to reassure the country that Project Fear was now over, shortly before fleeing towards the horizon, screaming his head off. Well who needs Project Fear now that we have the real thing?

Oh wait, wasn't he 'knifed in the back' by Michael Gove? Or was that just a narrative to distract the populace and allow Boris to come back later when everything's a bit less confusing and stressful? Well who knows anymore? 'The truth' is just one of a number of proliferating narratives.

Never mind though, I glimpsed a report in the Mail on Sunday about some trawlermen rejoicing that they would no longer have to observe EU quotas. So we'll definitely have fish, which there was always such a shortage of before – why, I can hardly remember the last time I even saw fish, must have been about 40 years ago I suppose. Now we'll be able to over-fish. We'll have so many fish they'll be lying rotting in the streets.

As for those 'shackles' that the Sun talked about, it seems that some people feel that their removal from the country has freed them to be openly racist. How very refreshing! Perhaps shackles was the wrong metaphor, maybe it's more like a big rock has been removed from atop the land to reveal the maggots squirming beneath. How would that have looked on the Sun's front page I wonder?

This Saturday's headline was LOVE VILE LAND, a rather obscure phrase suggesting that a Brexit-inspired collective psychosis had struck the editorial team. Although on closer examination, the story was about ITV2 reality show Love Island, the complexities of Brexit presumably having been judged too challenging for the reader.

Prior to the referendum Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday, anticipating a Leave victory, spoke about England awaking from a long slumber, a metaphor which, though rather (ahem) tired, does seem quite pertinent: I mean, we're certainly awake now. The Remain side have woken up to the fact that things can't go on quite like this anymore, and the Leave side have woken up to the fact that the old England they thought they'd lost and could now 'take back' actually isn't there: there's just a void, which could conceivably be filled by almost anything.

But, as an eminent Englishman once said, there's no future in England's dreaming.

Brexitstential Crisis

Interesting times, yes. Throughout the campaign, I only ever glimpsed a part of one 'Vote Leave' ad. As I remember it had a split screen depicting, on one side, 'the NHS in the EU' and on the other side 'the NHS out of the EU'. In the former you saw a crowded waiting room and in the latter a practically deserted one. No explanation was offered about what happened to all those patients in the first scene. Were they deported? Did they die? Can't they afford healthcare anymore?

Well it looks like we're going to find out now.

I didn't watch any of the coverage of the referendum. On Friday morning I was hoping to delay discovering the result for as long as I could manage. But Chris Hawkins on 6 Music gave the game away almost as soon as I turned the radio on. Later, Shaun Keaveny described seeing on his way to work a woman stopping her car and getting out to vomit in the street. He didn't explicitly link this to Brexit but the inference was clear.

Post-Brexit, Brentwood High Street has taken on a malign cast, I noticed on Saturday. For a start it seemed largely deserted, as if everyone had already been deported, or had voluntarily fled the country. Only the army cadets seemed to be out in force, on a recruitment drive – well, yes, we may be needing them now I suppose. Most of the people I saw looked freakish, guilty or psychotic. The front page of the Sun in WH Smith's with its depiction of a triumphant Britain 'freed from its shackles' seemed so out of keeping with my mood of unease that I felt like I was in a totalitarian state being fed hysterical lies.

Mind you, the Sun's front page probably always makes me feel like that. It was just that, on this occasion, I could imagine that nearly half the population might be feeling something similar, which should have made me feel better, yet somehow didn't. The Mail's headline was TAKE A BOW, BRITAIN, as it congratulated its readers, or some of them, for voting the way it had told them to. Curiously, the Mail on Sunday, hedging its bets, had urged its readers to vote Remain – how confusing! - so the headline on Sunday by rights should have been FUCK YOU, BRITAIN but sadly it wasn't.

Meanwhile, that Mr. Farrago seemed to be everywhere crowing about 'taking our country back' – back to the 1950's probably. Given the narrow victory his rhetoric seems hollow indeed. I suspect that the Tories have placed him front and centre as the punchable face of Brexit while they snigger behind his back, and that he will be dispensed with in due course but then I don't know anything, and nobody does. David Cameron has left the building, and it's hard to blame him. It's like half the country threw their toys out of the pram when he told them over and over again not to, and why should he pick them up? Of course there were the rest of us who held on to our toys like good children but they will be confiscated anyway. So unfair!

Nevertheless the fact that this was a decision that wasn't based on short-term economic gain is interesting I suppose, and the plummeting pound should surely have the anti-capitalist in all of us rejoicing. And people voted Leave for all kinds of reasons, not just narrow-minded or unexamined ones. Dennis Skinner was a Brexiteer and so was the half-Romanian, half-Italian taxi driver who drove me to the station the other day.

So nothing is set in stone. This might usher in a new golden age. Or on the other hand the UK might rot amongst its moth-eaten dreams of past glories. Or everything might stay the same. It's your choice!

Or rather, it isn't anymore. Unless there's another referendum. But I think the one thing we've learned from all this is that, unless there's an election, ordinary people should stay out of politics. They only confuse things.