The Olympics Opening Ceremony - My Part In Its Downfall

...although in the event, the Olympics opening ceremony didn't look much like Alex's curry. I watched it round Justin's, with Bobs and Mum and Nicki Hunt. My first thought on seeing the pastoral landscape Danny Boyle had come up with was, oddly enough, of Dizzee Rascal. That, before long, Dizzee would appear, singing Bonkers while dressed as a sheep, seemed strangely inevitable. And appear he eventually did, although not dressed as a sheep. It was a goat, as I remember, although I had had a lot of wine by then.

The surprise was - it was good, staying more or less the right side of tacky. Evelyn Glennie with her mad witch-hair, fronting a thousand drummers - inspired, I thought. I know that those huge chimneys thrusting out of the earth is an image that has been branded 'a cack-handed symbol of industrialization' by no less an authority than me, on this very blog. But I was talking about Lark Rise To Candleford then. A cack-handed symbol of industrialization was precisely what the ceremony needed at that stage. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Danny Boyle hadn't googled the phrase, and got the idea off here.

You could also argue that the history was a little bit approximate here - according to this ceremony, the Beatles released Seargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band midway through the industrial revolution - but, let's face it, this was mainly intended to be watched by foreigners, so what the hell.

'Organised chaos' was how one of the commentators described it, which wasn't far off the mark. Even on TV it wasn't always easy to follow, and Nicki for one had trouble identifying some of the participants. 'Harry Enfield' turned out in fact to be Kenneth Branagh. Daniel Craig was initially greeted as 'Boris Becker'. A huge representation of the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang was mistaken for Tony Blair. OK, so I made the last one up, but Justin did dream the other night that the former PM was nuzzling him in an attempted seduction, and what's that all about then?

I wasn't quite so keen on the music later on, which reminded me of that bit in Sam's nightclub when they used to go 'back in time' and play snippets of old hits - and even they would have drawn the line at Tiger Feet, surely. And most people had their patience stretched by the parade of athletes from 204 (I believe) countries. Half an hour had gone by and they were still in 'A'. I mean, American Samoa? Who knew? Was Brazilian Samoa going to be represented? Czechoslovakian Samoa? Danish Samoa? As Harry Hill used to say - you get the idea.

But it all ended spectacularly with Paul McCartney being burned alive in a giant cauldron, so everyone was very happy and excited, and I for one can hardly wait for the closing ceremony.

blasphemy and vasectomy

There's very little on telly at the moment, although Superstar provides, at the very least, plenty of amusing instances of taking the Lord's name in vain (vain being very definitely the word for these preening would-be Saviours). 'Just join the other Jesuses on the stairway', says Amanda Holden, who also uses such happy phrases as 'all our Jesuses' and 'your favourite Jesus', either of which might serve as the title of a spin-off. Meanwhile, Biblical scholars can rack their brains trying to work out the Scriptural relevance of the various chart hits the Sons of God are obliged to bellow out. And indeed, after a moment of psychic adjustment, it isn't hard to see Him serenading Mary Magdalene with Roxanne, or wailing 'I can't get no satisfaction' while writhing in agony on the cross.

One day, perhaps Islam will reach this pitch of sophistication. I can hardly wait.

Saturday provided that rare thing - a night out in Brentwood. We attempted without success to get into the Gardener's Arms, once a dive, but now so swanky that it can afford three doormen with instructions to bar anyone wearing trainers. I didn't even consider that what I was wearing could be precisely described as 'trainers', but it was no time to argue about the niceties of footwear classification with large men who no doubt had firmly-held views on the subject. We moved on to the Swan, with a disgusted Richard S surveying the swarms of TOWIE-tourists and proclaiming Brentwood to be 'shit'.

For some reason - maybe some kind of glitch on Facebook - I thought that Richard had three daughters. He maintains, and I have no real reason to doubt him, that he only has two. As if to prove it, he gave Stuart and myself a detailed account of his vasectomy: 'I'll always remember the smell of my own cock burning', he reminisced, misty-eyed (our eyes were watering by now, too). I hadn't imagined on leaving the house that evening that I would become so intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of Richard's scrotum, but life is full of surprises.

There was a curry. Kevin memorably said that Alex's fully-laden plate looked like the Olympics opening ceremony...
 

Kuroneko

In this film, a Japanese ghost story from 1968, a pertinent question is asked. What if the evil cat-demons you, as a samurai, have been commissioned to kill are in fact your late wife and mother? Furthermore - this being the case - to what extent are they still your late wife and mother? As the hero at one point puts it - 'Are you my mother or are you a cat?'  What to do? If only Dear Deidre was around then. As it is, the answer served up by the film is this: sleep repeatedly with the wife, but hack off one of Mum's arms. Then - the problem being essentially insoluble - lie down to die and let the falling snow cover your body.

The film has some striking scenes, but at other times is rather stiff and stagey (the influence of the Noh plays, according to the notes handily supplied by the BFI). I saw it book-ended by the heads of two (perhaps it's fair to say excessively tall) people sitting right in front of me. They didn't obscure the subtitles, but I still felt that my experience was slightly diminished.  It isn't really fair to resent people for having heads, yet this is the position I found myself in. Was it too much to hope that the heads would detach themselves from their bodies and fly away, as is the wont of some demons' heads in Japanese folklore?

In Rokuro Kubi, from Lafcadio Hearn's Oriental Ghost Stories (as recently read in the very affordable Wordsworth edition) a wandering priest finds the heads of the family who have put him up for the night 'flitting around' in a nearby grove, 'eating worms and insects'. Sad to say, nothing like this has yet happened to me, but if it does you'll be the first to know.

Torch It!

The Torch came through Brentwood via Ingrave and Herongate, so having escaped work early, I walked down to Ingrave to inspect the route beforehand. Not much was going on. Plastic chairs had been set out in a few gardens and the decrepit former Peugeot garages had been painted white; occasionally, someone in a high-vis jacket might hand you a flyer, if you weren't on your guard.

In Herongate everyone was gathering at the cricket common, only to disperse again to line the streets as it got closer to the time. The relentless rain from earlier had actually cleared up, which was an unending source of amazement. As we stood there, numerous police vehicles went past, though I doubted if this was anything unusual - just preparations for a normal Friday night on Brentwood High Street.

Eventually, standing there gazing at a deserted road and hearing sirens in the distance, I began to lose track of just what we were waiting for - was it something 'good' or something more ambiguous, like, say, the end of the world? The appearance of a woman dressed as a white rabbit, just by the school, did not really resolve the question, one way or the other. Neither did the gleaming buses of the sponsors as they came rushing past, bearing hyped-up disco-dancing people handing out bottles of a substance called 'Coke' - because surely the Apocalypse too will be 'brought to you' by someone (probably a bank).

Meanwhile a conversation of some complexity had arisen between my Aunt Doreen and Rita from across the road about Doreen's late brother's name and a woman called 'Joan Cross' ('Did she know my brother?' 'No, she knows you.') and there began to be a feeling that the question over the identity of 'Joan Cross' might even overwhelm the bigger picture of the Olympics. Then a woman ran past bearing a torch as promised, and we could all go home.

Further on down the road, according to witnesses, the woman with the torch had become an Oriental gentleman after a mysterious process known as 'the changeover'. Then the whole thing moved on towards the Amy Childs salon, never to be heard of again, as far as I am aware.

body particles

At work, Carol asked Richard about his leg, or that's what Lorraine and I thought she said – in fact she had said 'leak' (there has been one in his house), which left us somewhat bemused when he described it as 'still damp' and said that he was 'waiting for someone to get the bits in to fix it.' I was wondering if this was a complication of his gout...

Then there was the saga of the 'bottom cable'. This was an attachment to go with a member of staff's headset. I had ordered it and Ben the temp had signed for it, but subsequently it had gone missing. An atmosphere of suspicion immediately clouded the office, and it began to seem that nobody would be allowed to leave until the culprit confessed. After a while it came to my attention that many people suspected the clutter on my (notoriously untidy) desk of concealing it. No doubt my maniacal laughter hardly helped matters, but it was only the word 'bottom' that was so effortlessly amusing to me (Imagine! A cable you feed into your bottom!). Luckily someone relented and a replacement was ordered, leaving the situation teasingly unresolved.

Needless to say, it was not on my desk, and neither was it up my arse – I know that's what you were thinking. Nevertheless, I could not repress a shiver of alarm on looking up at my screensaver to see a grinning Gary Lineker, fist clenched and arm bared to the elbow, fronting the current 'Roll Up Your Sleeves' blood donor campaign. It really does look like he's going to stick that arm somewhere he shouldn't...

On the radio last week Vanessa Feltz was sitting in for Jeremy Vine and talking about old men wanking each other off in care homes. Really! Luckily JV has now returned to raise the tone. Would people who had lived in the UK all their lives pass the new toughened-up citizenship tests, he was asking. Judging by my performance on the questions they asked, it's just as well I'm already in the country. Apparently the Clifton suspension bridge wasn't designed by Bernie Clifton. He was that guy who used to pretend to ride an ostrich on Crackerjack. Mind you, I ought to get a few points for knowing that (and also that the ostrich's legs were really his.)

Then they discovered, or announced that they might have discovered, the Higgs-Boson particle, so some scientist was on to explain why this was so earth-shattering. He proceeded to describe it in terms of Margaret Thatcher moving through a crowded room, and talked about how much excitement it had generated on his Twitter feed. Yes, but what practical applications did it have? 'Who knows?', said the expert. Well we were hoping – you.

But this was his way of saying, effectively, 'the sky's the limit'. Really, almost anything could come of this. Soon it might even be - as a song subsequently played by Jeremy had it – 'raining men'. Although in reality this would no doubt be a grimmer prospect than the Weather Girls seem to imagine... I would rather like to have had the expert's opinions on that matter, but by then they'd moved on to another topic – whether knitting was 'anti-social' I think it was.