Red Leader: Enemy activity has been slight

My writing hero is Hunter S Thompson.

Like many other people who scratch a living out of writing, I admired his total balls-out devotion to telling the truth. At least the truth that he saw. Not many people dare to do it.

He wrote this:

"The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.

I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs.

Old whores don't do much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird.

So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad..."

Yeah, and maybe there IS hope.

Although not fit to clean the dust from his hash-pipe, I agree with him and too often I find writing a ball-aching chore.

But I enjoy immensely writing this blog.

There is so much angst at present about BCUK and its strange band of followers, among whom I am proud to number myself.

But really it's a hopeless target to attack the medium.

Hunter would have relished, did relish, the instant response to his words.

If you can go to the bother - and have the belief - that people might be interested in something you have written and published on the internet, then I think you at least should have the courage of your convictions to defend it if called upon to do so.

Otherwise "publish" it in a diary at home and let it remain forever unsullied by anyone else's opinion or criticism.

Having said that, trolls and snarlers are one thing; geeks who have the fiendish ability to clone your blog and masquerade as you are something else and should be dragged across the town and beaten with whipchains.

And

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like sport scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."

So this is Christmas.

Well it self-evidently is not, but my generous employers can't help themselves and are falling over each other to be the first to dish out the P45s.

Yes.

It's the Annual Merry Yuletide Redundancy spree.

This time last year, or rather, in few weeks' time this time last year, I was made redundant and had to re-apply for my own job.

Naturally, this created a good deal of seasonal angst and more than a touch of tinseled turmoil in my already exploding head, and it wasn't until Christmas Eve that I learned I was "safe."

Many colleagues weren't so fortunate and got the axe, and my own small part of the Evil Empire was decimated.

Now we're approaching the year-end, and off we go again.

Time to cash-in on a few quick job losses and get the headcount savings into this year's P&L ledger.

The London head office "benchmarking exercise" again is in full flow and we're being softened up by the executive class for their trite weasel words of how losing a few editors will "Bring-Our-Newspapers-Closer-To-The-Communities-We-Serve."

Arrant nonsense of course; cut and pasted from the dead lexicon of Management-Speak that's handed out to them along with the company BMW and BUPA health plan upon taking office.

Clipboard holders, Blackberry botherers and thrusting young corridor walkers of every stripe have a renewed spring in their step this month.

They perch, Meerkat-like, on the fifth floor, nostrils wide and twitching, their slitty eyes darting hither and yon for the next cost-saving scalp they can offer up to the chairman in the hope that, if they can prove themselves ruthless enough, they'll be invited along to the company summer golf weekend at La Manga, where they will serve the drinks and tug their forelocks to the board's best friends.

I KNEW it would happen again. I KNEW I should have flicked them the Vees and got out.

But...

Tag THAT.

Drugs and schools. A marriage made in heaven.

I was left wide-eyed in wonderment last night watching the TV news to first see some Greasy Government Suit moaning on that he'd lost all confidence in the nation's principal scientific advisor on drugs.

Yes.

He felt he could no longer trust the scientist to kiss his arse on his view that All Drugs Are Bad. So he sacked him.

Strange? I thought so.

But then the next item was an even Greasier Government Suit moaning on that he'd lost all confidence in the nation's parents.

Yes.

Because they LIE and CHEAT to get their children into a half-decent primary school.

And now he was going to fix it that anyone caught LYING and CHEATING again would have their collar felt and could well spend time at Her Majesty's Pleasure if they dared defy him.

And they ran some VT of a REALLY BIG room in Hackney Council stuffed to the rafters with spotty-faced, smirking snoopers, all paid from the public purse, whose sole job it is is to track down criminal parents hoping to get an education for their kids.

And instead of being embarrassed by this to the point of suiciding, the Greasier Suit was instead puffed up with pride at how fooking NAILS it made him look.

It had obviously never occurred to him, not for even a second, to consider why parents might LIE and CHEAT to this end.

Never occurred to him that instead of employing a thousand gobshites to pry and poke into the backgrounds of families, it might be a better idea to actually put a few bob into improving primary schools and thus - in a single bound - end the need for all the LYING and CHEATING which has so disgusted him.

And it also never occurred to this Suit-full-of-bugger-all that the nation's parents had by now lost all confidence in HIM.

Which, when you think about it, is really the point.

It was a tableau of pure Kafka and will stay with me for a long, long time.

Or at least until next May.

There was a time and it was not so very long ago when I would really look forward to the winter.

I loved the long dark nights and the long dark overcoats.

To me, it always resonated with something deep inside.

Not sinister, necessarily, just enjoyably melancholy and perhaps even a touch romantic.

It's a great time for viewing your life as if you were in a film, when, being young, you have the luxury of being so self-possessed.

I indulged myself as a mysterious character treading softly as the screenplay slowly evolved around me, either in the deserted streets of a silent city or in the depths of a barren and bleak countryside.

My happiest times have been experienced in the misty gloom of winter nights.

The thrill of winter: When I was in my 20s, it was walking through unknown avenues in Bologna, Milan or New York or, more prosaically, Liverpool and London, throwing long shadows, running and laughing with friends to shelter from squally rain and hail.

To me, it was just wonderful.

Such a different and unalloyed joy as opposed to the moany way I can easily feel now about being rained on.

A little bit later in life, it was huddling under an abandoned fisherman's shelter on the River Dee, the river flowing thick and dark as ink in deepest Wales. I was with my wife and young family on New Year's Eve, miles away from anyone and everything, and I was stunned by the absolute stillness.

A massive silence observed under a massive sky that you won't ever find in any city, town or village.

It was mystical and I'm sure had something of the old Celtic magic about it.

I felt that I was experiencing something - was even part of something - very old and important yet now totally forgotten.

Well, the more remote stretches of the River Dee at dusk on New Year's Eve can do that to a man.

I listened and watched spellbound as snow fell in sheets on the fields all around us.

It was so quiet, so intense that, eventually, if you tuned in, you could actually hear the snowflakes landing nearby and above on the rickety shelter roof.

After a while, when the sun had disappeared behind the hills and it was becoming pitch black, we trudged back through the snowfield, the only guiding light the rosy glow from the windows of "our" ancient and much-loved cottage.

As we got closer, we could see our hearth-fire was still burning, as always, doing its steadfast duty and twisting peaty-coal smoke up through its hopeless chimney and warming the house...

Now another dark winter lies ahead as yet untouched, and I'm struggling to feel the spell.

I've spent a while analysing why this should be and I've not reached any reliable answers.

It's possibly to do with being pushed further and further into the corporate machine which, at my age, feels infinitely agonising.

Each dragging day teaches me that anyone with a touch of independent thought, let alone a touch of the wanderlust, is drawing down the kiss of death.

Still.

The snow will soon be falling again over the Dee at dusk and it will be mostly unnoticed by anyone.

And even if I won't be there to feel it any more, or see it any more, just knowing that it's happening and that my family's footprints once upon a time were the first and only ones to be there at the approaching dawn of a new year...well...that's fine.

Well, now I just feel STUPID.

For quite a few years, I played slide in a blues duo and every gig we did, we did Muddy Waters' Hoochie Coochie Man.

And every time we did it, I always thought the words in the second verse ominously warned the listener: "I've got John The Kangaroo and we're gonna mess with Sue."

I admit I was puzzled as to why a Mississippi Bluesman, credited as the Father of Chicago Blues, would own a kangaroo, much less one called John, and also how he and his sinister and mysterious marsupial would "mess" with this poor girl Susan.

Bit odd, but then the whole song is a "bit odd" anyway, and I thought no more about it.

So imagine my surprise when, today, almost ten years later, I googled the lyrics and found the actual words were: "I've got John the Conqueror root, I'm gonna mess with you."

None the wiser, I googled again and discovered: "John the Conqueror root is one of the staples of African-American folk magic. Its use in mojo hands is as ubiquitous as its qualities are varied, and its very name signifies power and prosperity to many."

So there we are.

A lesson in Blues voodoo and a kangaroo illusion shattered.

Never a dull moment.

Had a quite surreal experience this evening while getting cash out the ATM at the local Strangebury's.

Silhouetted against orange sodium lights of the high street, I saw the unmistakable outline of my ex-mother-in-law.

She was with her husband and, from the hazy view I had, what appeared to be a young girl.

As the apparitions drew closer shouting Hullos into the glare of the supermarket windows, I was convinced that the svelte youngster had to be one of their granddaughters. Maybe a 17-year-old college student.

But it wasn't. It was one of my ex-wife's sisters. She has to be 47 if she's a day, but she was so slim and trim and UNAGED I was actually taken aback.

Even though it's a bit cold, she had on a crop-top, tiny leather jacket and skinny jeans.

I literally couldn't believe how little she'd aged in the past 18 years, how she'd not put on a POUND of weight, and how her face was utterly unblemished by the harrowing experience of growing older and all the shit that goes with it.

Mind you, her husband is LOADED and in a powerful position in the London judiciary at a ridiculously young age. One of the youngest briefs to take silk in the city, so I was told.

Yeah, the kids are Alpine skiing with their "nanny" and we're still in the same part of town. Well, Richmond. Moved a bit nearer the park now.

But...You've gone a bit gray, Redleader, since I last saw you.

Oh, haven't I just.

And I've felt a bit shit since, to be honest.

Woe, woe and thrice freaking WOE!

Just handed over 60 hard-earned pounds to the local "computer shop" to pay them to kill off a Windows-attacking virus that no amount of AVG scrubbing would clean.

WEEKS pass...

Eventually. Plug in, switch on and...

Pop-up message appears from "WINDOWS POLICE PRO" (Utterly Bogus Department).

"Your computer is infected with extreme virtual bubonic plague etc etc etc.

"Click here to let us totally destroy your hard-drive and laugh in your trusting face."

Why, God?

WHY?

I think I wish I had as much energy as almost everyone else on the internet to ACTUALLY care about Jan Moir, and, locally, about the hot fuss about the peculiar "Blogger's Oath."

But then I also think I wish I did not.

In fact, I think that all the moaners and screamers and shouters should consider themselves fortunate that there is no one left of the calibre of Hunter S Thomson to rip them to shreds anymore.

It's so easy for the followers to jump upon the bandwagon. It always has been.

I don't have the wit or the words to do justice to it.

Hunter would have.

He would have been able to describe perfectly what's wrong about the cynicism of clever people writing polemical outrage for stupid people to get over-excited about.

But he's gone.

And all that's left is for us to nod our bovine heads in agreement with the rest of the herd and jump on the next digital bandwagon that rolls past.

And as to the Blogger's Oath, he would have taken it to the extreme and would have hunted the signatories down like a rat across the tundra.

And you know it.

Yeah you do.

I've got to stop following the England cricket team on the telly.

I find it a uniquely dispiriting experience.

Watching the same players make the same mistakes over and over (ha) again is really depressing.

As I write they are being battered and humiliated by Australia and look certain to be rolled over and knocked out.

What is it about England players that makes them capitulate so easily when the prize is so near? Ashes aside.

I think I know.

I think they must have some sort of Englishness DNA in them that makes trying "too" hard to win trigger a genetic response of making them feel unsporting and a little bit embarrassed.

Well most cricketers - BUT NOT ALL *sigh* - I suppose come from a bit of a posho background.

Private schools and privilege.

Yet you might think that the uber-competitive grounding of pushy, aspiring parents, a school governing board made up largely of the local Tory party and roughneck but rich self-made businessmen, would see the WIN-at-all-costs brainwashing become second-nature.

Well they must do, be posh and that, cos I never so much as even laid eyes on a cricket bat at school for the entire time I was there.

It was bloody football or nothing.

Which, on reflection, suited our pervy gym teacher who used to "test" our bodies for "wetness" with a stroke of his hand from neck to bum as we came out of the showers.

He got away with it by the hilarious pretence that it was the only way of checking we'd been under the water jets. I imagine that in 2009, as opposed to 1974, he'd be looking at a couple of years in chokey quicker than you could say "sicko".

But back then, well. You know what boys are like.

They'd rather sit at their desks caked in mud, blood and sweat than ever take a shower. It was important, do you see, that he checked.

But what the hell? EVERYONE'S sports teacher was a perv in those days.

Anyway, as usual, I digress appallingly and the sad old bastard is long dead.

Where were we? Oh yeah.

The point I was trying to get to was that, perhaps the Will to Lose demonstrated by our toothless cricketers is a latent reaction to all the horror of being pressed and bullied and mentally fucked-over in their early years?

Glib?

Oh yeah.

My home seems to have turned into an irresistible magnet for malevolent technology gremlins.

Anything that depends on electricity to function appears to be doomed.

Their evil spell is all over everything, from the toaster to the lappy, the PS3 to the microwave. Nothing works properly anymore.

Which reminds me, about one hundred years ago, I went on tour in the support band to the utterly excellent punk-poet John Cooper-Clark.

I know.

I am OLD.

Anyway.

I don't recall much about the gigs, except for two poems he did (and how much heroin he did, but that's for another story, maybe sometime never).

One was "Chicken Town", which was frighteningly brilliant, the other was a mock-lament to George Best and it was called "The Day My Pad Went Mad."

It was about how Besty was crazy for all-mod-cons and everything in his 1970s' penthouse playboy pad was run by electricity and remote control, from his curtains to his bath taps, his "stereo" to his telly, his entrance gates to his burglar alarm, and what happened when, one day, the technology went haywire.

Well. I know how Besty must have felt now.

I might not have eleccy gates or even a burglar alarm, but EVERYTHING else refuses to work.

*joins the Amish*