Null Points for the Eurovision Song Contest

It was odd to have a conversation my folks at the weekend and to find them all stoked up about the Eurovision song content. My folks don't get excited about much apart from every five years when they replace the lavatory seat so this was quite something.

A kind of distant memory stirred in me at those three words - Eurovision Song Contest. I recalled funny hurdy gurdy voices distorted now as if underwater from a long way away, using expressions such as "null points." There was a dim sense of shame and defeat as the German jury came in to deprive the UK of the points it needed to win.

Buck's Fizz won Eurovision quite a few years before this picture was taken - Man Alive


Some psychologist probably has a theory that helps us deal with the Eurovision song contenst. There are four stages of Eurovision - belief, disappointment, shame and displacement. When you are a certain age you actually want your country to win. Later on you feel disappointment when it doesn't. Soon afterwards you realize that winning is more embarrassing than losing. The song contest, you soon realise, is that dorky Trainspotting/coin collecting club you were a member of at school. You want to forget it ever existed. You blank it out.

But when it comes to one's parents the psychologist will be confounded. They never left stage one of belief, bordering on stage two when the United Kingdom inevitably lost. No chance, now they told me - the song contest is dominated by the disparate parts of the former Yugoslavia which all vote for each other and are hell bent on delivering Blighty a good kick in the Balkans.

Frankly this surprised me as I couldn't imagine the Serbians enthusiastically voting for Bosnia and Croatia given that they were lobbing grenades at them a few years ago, but I let it go.

"So who won?"

"Sweden."

"Um right."

I winced as my mother compared the Swedish entry to Kate Bush as you really just can't compare Kate to anyone. Then my folks proceeded to get all sentimental about a group of Russian grannies who took second place.

It appears they were talking about Buranovskiye Babushki. Now call me cold hearted but I find it hard to warm to a group of aged peasants in period costumes. Maybe I have read too many Tolstoy novels but it's hard for me not to be weirded out by Russian peasants, not least because the only famous Russian peasant  I can think of was Joseph Stalin, a not altogether nice all round dude.

Nor was my parents' complaint that the United Kingdom never wins Eurovision exactly accurate. I remember Brotherhood of Man and Buck's Fizz, albeit a few years ago. When Rolf Harris filmed his show from our school hall, showcasing his big ol' didgeridoo, Brotherhood of Man were the featured band. I recall their Rolls Royces outside our beat up school hall and the smug superstars emerging in fur coats as if they were the Rolling Stones after they followed up their Eurovision success with one hit. And that was it. And who ever thinks about them now? Well me - obviously. But just because I'm on the subject.

Bucks Fizz were more successful but nobody ever took them seriously. The United Kingdom last won the contest in 1997 with Katrina and the Waves.

André Claveau at the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest in Hilversum

Apparently the UK's 2012 entry was by someone called Engelbert Humperdinck who was 76 and I had last heard about in 1976, although what appeared to be repeated botox treatments made him look - well like a tortoise of indeterminate age.

And the contest was held in Baku - which is nowhere near Europe when I last looked. Apparently most countries don't want to win it because it costs a fortune to host it the next year.

America is blithely oblivious to this weird time warp competition. I can't say I miss it but there's something curiously reassuring about it, like coming across the arm chair you used to sit in as a kid. I sometimes find it odd that my parents never change with the times. But, in saying that I'd be way out of my comfort zone if I turned on the webcam one day and they were bopping round the coffee table to Rihanna.

An Unlikely Victory for the Cornish Pasty

Back in the day when men were men and sheep were nervous and we had better things to do than farting around with blog templates, there were Cornish pasties.

The pasties were made by the womanfolk of Cornish tin miners who toiled in damp and hazardous conditions underground. They could be dangled down on ropes and were hardy enough to withstand the deprivations of nature.

The Cornish Pasty Association cites references going back to the reign of Henry III in the 1200s. But the pasty with its crust became a mainstay during the heyday of the tin mines.

"There are hundreds of stories about the evolution of the pasty's shape, with the most popular being that the D-shape enabled tin miners to re-heat them underground as well as eat them safely. The crust (crimped edge) was used as a handle which was then discarded due to the high levels of arsenic in many of the tin mines," the association states.


This morning a newspaper I once worked on in the south west of England declared "Victory," on its front page. It was declaring the Government's climbdown on its plans to introduce a tax on Cornish pasties and other hot snacks after critics said the uppity crew of Eton educated boys who are in power today were targeting the working classes and their snacks.

Apparently pasties will no longer be taxed, as long as they are still hot.

It's curious that the victory of the humble pasty over the disdainful elite should make such headlines at a time when kids are being massacred in Syria, but news is as much about escapism as it is news.

I have something of a soft spot for the Cornish pasty as it reminds me of family holidays in St. Ives, although the pasties invariably seemed to contain something crunchy like grit and the meat was a curious grey color as if a convenient rat had been passing when the makers were stirring the nefarious ingredients.

No matter. Like haggis the pasty is a part of British culture. As a kid I was always fascinated by the ruins of the tin mines that clung precariously onto the edges of the Cornish cliffs. A scene from the bodice ripper Poldark would come to mind when there had been a tragic accident down the mine and the womanfolk would rush weeping to the coast.

My fond memories of Cornwall come rushing back, not that I appreciated it much when I lived nearby. Maybe it was all those infernal stories about pasties that I was forced to write.

How to Build the Perfect Urban Garden in 10 Fool Proof Steps

It's very hard to believe that in a short space of time this front bed will soon be an urban paradise.

Even harder to believe given that it got really hot and humid and I downed tools to find a beer after I found a mosquito the size of a rabbit feasting on my arm. Now a thunder storm is coming over which ties in rather nicely with my motto "if you don't succeed at first, give up."

The house in the backgroound belongs to our smug neighbors BTW. They always succeed in mowing the lawn in diagonal lines while I'm lucky to get the mower anywhere near the grass. They have neat plants in the beds. Nothing too daring or fancy. They flower right on cue. I'm sure cloning was involved somewhere down the line. I prefer the organic and random approach. The four foot tall dandelion plant may have been somewhat ungainly but it had a flower on it didn't it?

If we start rooting out creatures that look different to us the next thing we know we'll be driving Edward Scissorhands out of suburbia. Do we really all want to be the same? Why the drive to be the perfect neighbors next door? I have theories about folks who have strimmers on their Christmas list.

Contrary to common belief I used to have an interest in gardening. I saw my white and purple rock garden as a triumph of serene art over the prosaic nature of everyday life. The whites twinkled out there in the moonlight by the tinking water feature.

But successive in-laws saw fit to rip up my efforts (yes the size of my violin grows with every word written). Perhaps then I should have stormed outside screaming about the defilement of art and how the Nazis burned books en route to the Final Solution. Probably they didn't understand. They did spend a fair bit on landscaping to be fair.

But instead I grew peevish. The dreams of a perfect garden shrank to a small kernel in my head to the extent that the motion of weeding became as remote as a moon walk off one of Saturn's little known satellites.

My retreat from being Suburban Man was complete. I was lazy and worthless and labelled as such. My solution was to grab a beer and to look up the Picture of Dorian Gray.

Still I realized there is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. That and the fact that "conscience makes egotists of us all."

So perhaps the answer is to be found in unconsionableness because only then will be cease to be egomanicas. More practically the answer is in gardening. We can only bring about transformation when we learn to hate the weeds, loathe their coarse stems and raggedly heads, wake up in a cold sweat with our hands round the necks of thistles like war veterans who wake up choking an imaginary enemy.

And if some guy with scissors for hands comes anywhere near my new look front yard he'll be driven out of the neighborhood.

How do you like the new template BTW - I got bored with the last one but I'm not sure about this one either?

Oh and there was Mumford and Sons

One of the biggest problems I find adjusting to normality after the A-Z challenge - what the hell normality constitutes - is I keep thinking of bands I should have included.




The trouble is we are all collectors at heart. We are pale faced philatelists with fat knees trapped in our parents' basements greedily collecting our empires of stamps. When the lights come on and someone enters our foul lairs we grasp each tiny stamp into our pasty arms, determined not to give away a single one. At least metaphorically speaking.

From the outside we may put on a rather nifty act of being cool, calm and sophisticated. But inside we are screaming maniacs being pushed down the aisles of Lowe's at a breakneck speed on a cart like the kid with the bike in The Shining screaming: : "I want to collect garden gnomes."

And if they come with cute fishing rods, so much the better.

So tonight I found myself wanting to add Mumford and Sons to my collection, even though it had long gone.Gosh I am sounding like a character from a Nick Horby novel.

I instinctively like these guys and not just because they're English and have a name that should be over a store in a sepia photograph. They have a kind of farmer's boy with cello chic and look like they would be rather good fun down the pub. Not that I have done any research this time. They could be manic depressives for all I know who want to spent all night talking about the Corn Laws of 1804. This is probably a bad example as I have something of a passing interest in the Corn Laws of 1804. Is there a Corn Laws chat room? Back to the basement.

Anyhow I have no idea what Little Lion Man is about but I instinctively know it's my theme tune.

The nature preserve - a world away

I'm not sure I used to be a virtual person. Quite probably I used to be a real one. Now I'm not so sure.

Today I will be developing a new website for a client. And reading an article about forthcoming changes by Google and what they mean for SEO. From there I will be synthesizing and publishing a piece on my professional blog about what this means to the slaves. By this I mean all of us who are enslaved to Google, Facebook and Twitter as surely as the mill workers in the 18th and 19th centuries were slaves to Arkwright's spinning frame.

Part of me lives on on this blog but I'm not sure which part. What was euphemistically coined the World Wide Web back in the day has taken away much of our world.

It makes me wonder if we develop web personas; if we talk to people in a certain way in cyberspace and then struggle to relate when we meet them. Or maybe we struggle to relate period.

Last night I met some people from my former newspaper. We exchanged the inevitable jokes about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and about how one day it would be just another page in cyberspace, perhaps sooner than anyone cared to recall.

And when the conversation fell silent we sought solace in our laptops or in searching feeds on our Blackberries.

All of which makes me wonder how we lived when the world was lit only by fire. How we clung to each other with just the stars to light our way, how the night seemed immeasurably long and our lives run with the seasons.

In some deep place I had a romantic notion of the Middle Ages, picturing the Pilgrims winding their way to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham lit only by the Milky Way

Inevitably, my shallow perceptions defied reality,. Some time ago I wrote about Graham Manchester's book A World Lit Only by Fire in which he described a world of dangerous medieval villages where the locals would as soon butcher you and eat you as they would welcome you; of a world where nuns and monks spent most of the time copulating; of a world of short life spans and disease and filth, so at odds with the idea of knights and round tables and damsels in distress.

Between the desire

And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow




Sir Walter Scott has much to answer for I fear. TS Eliot - less so.

Conscious of a loss of identity and just an indefinable sense of loss generally as I drifted past the lonely planets out there somewhere in hyperspace, I sought solace in nature.

Hoffler's Creek is only remarkable in its unremarkableness. It's a small urban park but it feels far away from the soul numbing strip malls. Yet it was a beautiful May morning of gusting breezes and bright sunshine. The pull of nature was too powerful to resist. I abandoned my laptop and headed for the road less traveled, a dirt track with the silent waters to my left and the teeming woods to my right.

Sunlight slanted in and out of the eaves and tall purple flowers danced by the silver water. The sun and wind put me in mind of a day in Ireland so many years ago, by the fast moving waters of a creek on a day when the clouds moved fast in their pools of sunlight, the boggy mountains basked in the rays and I spied a jolly azure boat lying bottom up by the water. The moment was no more remarkable than any other. But it lived with me somehow.

Gazing at the white herons over the marshes I was reminded how it is possible to find redemption in nature. We may feel lost but we only need to reach out and touch.

Passing on a Kreativ Blogger award to lucky you

I recently received a Kreativ blogging award from  Mina Lobo at Some Dark Romantic who is clearly my favorite Goth mom of all time; although to be fair I'm not sure I have met any others.

Lust, bitterness, & despair look great on her, apparently. Of course it looks great on all of us once we reach a certain age. Just as Brut 33 smelled good on us when we were 15.

So thanks Mina. I don't receive many awards, probably because I can be too lazy to pass them on as is correct etiquette in polite blogging society. Indirect thanks to Tracy for giving the award to Mina.

The rules are I have to pass this on to six (oh so lucky - you will hate me in the morning) people and say 10 things about myself that nobody knows. It's hard to narrow it down to six deserving bloggers, even harder to find 10 things about myself that I haven't bored folks about on numerous occasions on Brits. OK so one can but try.

1 - Betty Manousos - Cut and Dry - Betty is officially the world's nicest blogger. She spends ages saying positive things on other people's blogs (even mine) and posts pictures that make me nostalgic for the Devon coast.

2 -Jayne at Suburban Soliloquy - Jane's blog is so highbrow I sometimes have to read her posts twice. I feel like reaching for the dunce's cap and I passed my 11 plus (I think).

3 - I Know, Right by Jennifer Fabulous - No shortlist is complete without Jen on it (obviously).

4 - Mollie at OK in UK - Mollie is sort of me in reverse. She's from America but transplanted in an extreme part of England.

5 - Robyn Alana Engel - Life by Chocolate - Make a point of not reading her dating ads. from men posts at stuffy formal functions because you will a - get an inferiority complex re being a man and b - people may not be very impressed when you wet youself in public.

6 - Abi at Happy Frog and I - heartwarming stuff that will remind you of how completely stupid you were in the Eighties and that your affinity for Doctor Who is bordering on dorkdom.

And 10 things folks may not know about me.

1 - I convinced my daughter I was the first man on the moon by showing her photographs of Neil Armstrong and telling her a stone from the garden was a moon rock. She now thinks I am a pathological liar.

2 - I only lie when my lips move.

3 - I always wanted to be a top musician but failed the recorder rest and had to make do with banging the triangle in the school play.

4 - I didn't talk to anyone for my first three years of school but spent six months convinced I was a helicopter. Yeah I was really weird for a while back there.

5 - The Eighties didn't look great on me either. But I had this sad delusion I looked good in pointed pixie boots, skin right jeans with red stripes, a yellow string vest and Sun In sprayed in my hair.

6 - I had an odd addiction to the novels of Thomas Hardy when the rest of my class hated his guts.

7 - I support Liverpool because the school bully tried too force me to support Manchester United.

8 - I am the only journalist in Britain to ever interview a suicide bomber. Unfortunately he didn't tell me his intention at the time and I had erased the tape by the time everybody got interested.

9 - I once had a conversation with Emma Thompson on Hampstead Heath without realizing who she was.

10 - I have an aversion to revealing secret things about myself.

Hermitage Castle - A Cauldron of Evil

I lost my enthusiasm for microblogging Monday. A cold I have had for more than a week took a turn for the worse and I ordered the world's smallest violin in the hope of sympathy if not symphony.

Still, my last post about solitude brought hermits to mind, and by implication one of Scotland's most frightening castles.

On the bad lands of the borders which were bathed in the blood of the English and the Scots for centuries, Hermitage Castle rises out of the mist beyond a treeless beck. Its dimensions are still staggering, even though it's a ruin.

The castle stands in an area that was the key to the control over Liddesdale and the border area during the Scottish and English wars. Its history is steeped in torture, misery, witchcraft and blood.

According to the Myserious Britain website the castle has attracted legend and dark folklore throughout its history, even before its construction in the 1240s.

Before this citadel was built the area may have been the retreat of a holy man or a group of holy men as the name suggests.

The most famous tale a character known as Bad Lord Soulis who owned the castle in the Middle Ages. he was said to be a practitioner in black magic who was responsible for the disappearance of countless local children, who met a foul fate under the thick stone walls of Hermitage Castle. To help him in his nefarious dealings he had an assistant familiar known as Robin Redcap who bears some similarities to the Red Caps who haunt the border regions.

The evil assistant had promised his lord he would not be harmed by forged steel or ever be bound by rope.

But Soulis met a terrible fate. Eventually the locals rebelled and went to the king, who agreed he could be disposed of. They took him up to Nine Stane Rigg, a stone circle crowning a nearby hill top, wrapped him in lead and boiled him in a brass cauldron:


The Boiling of Bad Lord Soulis
On a circle of stone they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine,
They heated it up red and fiery hot,
Till the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.




They rolled him up in a sheet of lead,
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall,
They plunged him in the cauldron red.
and melted him lead bones and all.

Many ghosts are said to stalk the ruins of Hermitage Castle.

"It is said that the screams of the victims of Lord Soulis can be heard and the oppressive atmosphere is sometimes blamed on his roaming spirit. One visitor complained of being pushed by an unseen force while near the drowning pool by the chapel" Mysterious Britain stated.

Move Over Greta Garbo - His First Sentence

Like so many other things Microblogging Monday got knocked off track by lunch. But here's the good news. Jackson formulated his first sentence today.

Here's the bad news. It was "leave me alone."

Clearly a life as an artist or a writer beckons. As writers we rather like to be left alone. Like once on an organized press trip when I decided to give the tour a miss and instead lost myself in a labyrinth of streets in inner Jerusalem. There's a curious pleasure in being hopelessly lost in a strange city wandering the dusty streets of antiquity. The pleasure is only exacerbated by the feeling a panic that creeps up on us when we turn a corner into a dark and squalid looking street.

Inevitably I worked my way east in this divided city to the place where a wall separates Jewish and Islamic Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock was my beacon but when I reached the checkpoint an unamused looking Israeli border guard wouldn't let me through to see the mosque. His demeanor suggested I would be shot if I even tried to take a photograph.

The upshot. Nervously I handed my Canon to some Muslim kids who took a picture for me. They didn't run off with the camera but the picture was poor.

I thought about doing the English routine with the border guard. "Look I'm English. We helped get you into this mess."

Instead I just sloped off and got lost again. I have no idea what this has to do with Jackson's first sentence anymore.

I don't recall my own first sentence. I just hope it wasn't a life sentence.

Tattoos - What's the Point?

A number of people have walked into Starbucks sporting tattoos. With one notable exception they all looked awful.

I really can't understand tattoos.Why pay money for excruciating pain only to look worse than before?

The only thing I understand less than tattoos is smoking. Why pay lots of money to puff your lungs out and die a horrible death? At least crack addicts get high I'm told. Global legislation is clearly needed in this area. Smoking should be banned everywhere apart from in France because the French manage to look cool when they smoke.

Everybody else just looks like a red neck.

Sadly there are times when I find myself surrounded by people with tattoos clutching mitfulls of dollars for Marlboro Lights. There are the times when I remind myself never to go back to 7-Eleven,which is misnamed because it appears to be open all night.

I'm not totally anti tats; occasionally you see a tasteful one - a butterfly on a shoulder or a celtic design.

But all too often they tend to blur into a big green smudge on over white skin. Like a bruise. And who wants to wear their hurt on the outside?

Misheard Lyrics

Bonnie Tyler was a hard egg to crack

I tried to piece together a couple of lyrics from the song but failed miserably.

To be fair I've always been a sucker for misheard lyrics. I spend a good half decade wondering why Bonnie Tyler was singing "it's a hard egg." as opposed to "It's a heart ache."

And why in Message in a Bottle did we have to know from Sting that: "A year has gone since I broke my nose."

I was at one in my crusade against felines when I thought "Rock the Casbah" by the Clash was "Stop the cat box."

There are websites devoted to misheard lyrics. The name of the website Kissthisguy.com derives from a famous misheard Jimi Hendrix lyric in Purple Haze. "Scuse me while I kiss the sky."

This lyric was so often misheard that Hendrix would sometimes simulate kissing a male band member on stage.

The most popular lyric on this site today relates to the "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer which doesn't have quite the same ring to it if you mishear it as "Might as well face it, you're a dick with a glove."

Introducing Microblogging Monday

Microblogging Monday is a concept I invented about five minutes ago in Starbucks. It's a radical experiment that's based - frankly on boredom and the need for a distraction before doing real work.

Instead of the normal concept of a daily blog - if one is really stretching it as during the dog days of the A-Z challenge - you make numerous small posts.

Anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter will be familiar with the concept. But these microblogs are a bit longer than status updates which I find have become increasingly prosaic.

(Ever wondered why you are spending time reading why Becky Brown, who you last spoke to at the third grade school dance, has been listening to Biliel Jean by Michael Jackson and is feeling all lonesome?).

And do you give a flying?

To be fair the music at Starbucks rocks today. This is a great track but I have no idea who the singer is so I will try to glean a handful of words and Google it for ya.