Cleanliness is next to godliness & manners maketh the man.

Below, are the replies I lost to the ether. See? I’m not a total asshole.

Pat, you would think that those privileged enough to attend such tirribly, tirribly elite institutions as Trinity and the LSE would be fiscally independent by the time they were 45 wouldn’t you?
I mean the very idea that on the other hand one might stagger out of them into the real world at 26, desperately trying to remember one’s own name, having a half-assed mental breakdown at 27, then too quickly marrying an unsatisfactory wife, and then being honey-trapped by a Mossad agent at 49 (49 ferchristssakes) when one was on one’s uppers would be enough for any over-matched man, but apparently not.
Spies? I should live so long.

Savannah What happened to Syrup Sex? I’ll just tell you. I put the lid back on the tin when I wasn’t thinking , but guess what, I’ve got a new spoon, and I shall have my syrup, yes Sir, every day if I am spared.

Scarlet I knew it would be jazz number threes, I knew it in my marrow. And you are posh. Anyone says different gets a punch up the hooter.
Ax

Boyo! It is Popery. You are right! Ask three economists for a forecast, you get four answers. Badoom tish. Btw that bridge you shoed me, yeah that one…stay off it on the 25th , just sayin’ that’s all. Even that most tedious of heroes Welshmanman cannot save you.

Sarah, Inkspot, Pat Never trust a bank. Like, never. My word is my bond? Yeah, rightsville. They are run by the global anti-Semitic conspiracy.

Eryl Cheery is as cheery does.

Conan My bile is spent. (just like me money) Oish.

Conan Drumm said...

The only thing to pour on his grave would be a bottle of Milton.

11:24 AM, January 07, 2009

Conan Drumm said...

...that's Friedman, not Keynes...

12:25 PM, January 07, 2009

scarlet-blue said...

I'm rubbish at economics.
Apologies for my brief privatisation, I was wondering what it would be like to be proper posh... it was lonely.
Sx

12:38 PM, January 07, 2009

Sarah said...

i've had Guinness in an English pub.. i prefer stella artois, even if this guy from Liverpool told me it was "cheap". lagers over stouts any day.. but that's probably my "yank" upbringing, with the beer that's like water. if i wanted a full on meal, i'd eat one.

11:06 PM, January 07, 2009

Sarah said...

economics is best left to people who bother balancing their checkbooks.. i don't, not because i don't have to. but because i'm lazy.

11:08 PM, January 07, 2009

Comment deleted

This post has been removed by the author.

12:32 PM, January 08, 2009

inkspot said...

Sarah is spot on. Thank god for transatlantic insight. Balancing chequebooks is the bank's job. Of course, if you have two and a piece of stick, then they'll balance each other quite nicely.

3:49 PM, January 08, 2009

PI said...

Inkspot and Sarah: you trust the banks to balance your cheque books?
Blimey!

4:04 PM, January 09, 2009

Eryl Shields said...

It does seem awfully cheery Doc.

5:46 PM, January 09, 2009

Sarah said...

PI: i didn't say i trusted them, you underestimate my laziness.

Maroon: "you have mail."

6:17 PM, January 09, 2009

No Good Boyo said...

Economics is Popery. Your hocus-pocus comment is all the proof I need, Maroon.

The K Man, my legal advisor, also studied at the LSE. Not law, I hasten to add.

11:15 AM, January 10, 2009

scarlet-blue said...

I play a Yamaha Alto, YAZ 52, Dr Maroon. I'm on Vandoren Jazz reeds - no.3. You'd best start on something weaker though.... you have to learn Dr.

Oh, sorry, I'm replying to your question on an earlier post.
Sx

10:58 PM, January 10, 2009

savannah said...

three things:

online banking works.

maroon reads his email?

what happened to syrup sex?

xoxox

12:46 PM, January 12, 2009

Comment deleted

This post has been removed by the author.

11:10 PM, January 12, 2009

PI said...

I used to think that everybody who went to the LSE ended up a revolutionary - rather like Cambridge and spies. Am I wrong?

3:30 PM, January 13, 2009

Tamla Motown is 50 today!



Got my link up again. Sorry all for the delay. I will reply to my wonderful commenters forthwith.

You may be interested to know that among the many things thrown in my face recently, perhaps the most and yet least discouraging is my economic past.

If you have ever owned a BMW or drunk Guinness in an English pub, you will know what I'm talking about. Nobody but nobody can let it lie, they MUST comment.

"Guinness eh? Can't stand it meself."

"BMW. Not all they're cracked up to be. My brother-in-law had one, secondhand right enough, not a new one like this, but he said they were shite. He's a mechanic."

Same with economics.

I'm bringing it up because Walters has died.
Tell me where he is buried and I will piss on his grave.
In fact I will go to Liverpool and run a bus and we shall drink beer on the way and all of us shall piss on his grave.

Then I will move on to the West Midlands, East Midlands, Northumbria, Central Belt, Cumbria, Derbyshire, West Country, in fact, all the bits he shat on.

I'll be a millionaire in no time. It's an ill wind.

A Guid New Year!

Remember when British TV was the best in the world?
I've just spent an improving hour watching some unknown naturalist climbing trees.
It used to be about the bugs and stuff up the tree, now it's about her climbing up a rope.
Why don't they just throw a bucket of shite over the screen and be done with it?

I think I shall bathe and change the bed linen whether it needs it or not.

I Know, Let's have a party. A summer one. Yay.

Rock on, me bredren.

2008,
So farewell then…
It’s been a funny old year. Bit too bloody funny if you ask me. Still, horizons broadened, no arrests, met Boyo: Yeah, all things considered I’d say it was on the credit side.
And, there was the odd touch of genius about the place.

Which was nice.

Here’s one here;

Why does everyone have to bang on about sex the whole time? There are other things, you know, and I don't mean food or sums.
Here is a list of other things:
The M25 upgrade
Co-ordinated half-point rate cuts
The Clone Trooper Helmet
Salford Quays
Noble rot
Jonathan Kelsey for Mulberry
Foinavon
Broviac catheters
Arnold Palmer
Ambre Solaire
The Hillman Husky

Oh, before I forget, If God spares me, I SHALL. Every single day.


See you all in 2009.

2009 Resolutions

As God is my witness,

I will follow my own script.
I will visit Las Vegas for the first time
I will go back to New York
I will use my spectacles to read the Indie on Saturday and the Observer on Sunday
I will accept my weird eating habits
I will buy wonderful bread and make sandwiches
I will watch TV under a blanket
I will eat olives and smoked salmon and blinis
I will visit the pub on Saturdays for two drinks max then return for a nap at four
I will have just one glass of wine on Sunday until I have helped with dinner
I will remain kosher
I will be charitable
I will be faithful
I will be honourable
I will write about Islamist terror cells in Clackmannanshire
I will never compromise
I will tell the world about Dr Maroon
I will be me
PLAY IT LOUD!! ALRIGHTAH !!

Have arrived Windhoek 1300 hrs today.
No jetlag just knackered.
Had two bloody marys on flight from Johannesburg [sp?] and fell down stairs gratefully onto Namibian soil.
Locals thought I was so pleased to be back that I was kissing tarmac just like JPII. They weren't far wrong
Luckily it is full summer here (42 Celcius) so have sweated it out in 20 minutes and am now ready to hit the town. No sign of any cholera YET.
Cannot embed song (shitey bloody hotel computers) so will type out link below.

Back soon.

See when I'm pissed? I do love led Zepplin. They've got sumpfing, god knows what it is, but it's summpfinn.
This is for you because I love you all so much. It's almost poetry. It isn't, but it almost is. Whatever it is, it has balls, and that is what matters at the end of things, it has balls and gumption and they were a fantastic band. They were the very best of bands.


If the sun refused to shine etc.

Minus 6 all day.
The first sniff of a deep frost is always profoundly evocative for me. It’s an acid flashback is what it is. I am returned to the bedroom I had as a fourteen year old, God knows why I am transported back there, it’s just where I am taken is all.

It was a cool bedroom, everyone said so. I had painted a big Oor Wullie sitting on his bucket on one wall and a big version of the face on the King Crimson LP on the other. I had posters from Sounds and pictures cut out of NME, especially Frank Zappa, tacked and sellotaped to the wall and I played my records on a huge valve radiogram the size and shape of a chest freezer. I bought it at a scout jumble sale and they, the 72nd Troop, brought it round in a van and bustled it into the house in their kilts totally ignoring my mother’s embarrassing objections.

And then there were the fabulous mobiles that I made out of tin foil hanging from the ceiling. It’s a thirteen foot ceiling so they worked really well. I had painted the ceiling and frieze deep blue and stuck white stars on it. I loved those mobiles. They were an excellent embodiment of some-sort-of-Roger-Dean-type-mysticism.

Back to the green microdot. On just such a cold night as last night then, I sloped back in, having dropped some LSD. Well I ask you. There I was, fourteen and a half, eyes like organ stops, sitting up in bed listening to Wishbone Ash considering the mobiles and the soft focus girls in Mayfair, when God unexpectedly turned up in my head to tell me everything.




I mean the lot. The whole meaning, the structure, the point, 42, everything. I felt very pleased with myself. It was a marvellous privilege having God explain everything. After an hour or so, once God was sure I understood all these marvellous revelations, they were gently withdrawn, in the way you would remove a book from the hands of a sleeping child.

By December the room was emulsioned white, the mobiles, posters, and radiogram were gone in favour of Habitat Scandinavianism and I had inveigled my way into the 17th birthday party of a girl whose boyfriend never turned up. Obviously I kept the Frank Zappa pictures, because he, more than anyone, I realise now, was who I wanted to look like! Can you believe it? Frank Zappa. Me.

35 years later I was floating through Tate Liverpool on its disturbing sprung floor, tutting and sighing to myself at their utterly pisspoor mobiles when I was arrested by something much more to my taste; the altogether breathtaking sight of a beautiful woman. Well, who would have thought it?

If you are very, very, good, I will tell you what the smell of woodsmoke does to me. RZZZZZ!

I cannot believe the gall of David Miliband.
Instead of putting his shoulder to the wheel on the home front, he rushes off to Syria to kowtow on our behalf. Syria is at war with Israel with the avowed intention of invading the Golan Heights (Israeli sovereign territory) in order to launch terrorist attacks against innocent civilians.
He must know that you cannot have any truck with despots like Bashar al-Assad so what is his game? In what way can this nauseating appeasement of Hamas and Hizbullah and the Sunni insurgents advance Israeli or our own homeland security?
I hope Miliband’s road to Damascus takes him through Tel Aviv where some sense might rub off on him.

I have a Geraldine who helps around the place sometimes; she it was who had the misfortune to answer a bailiff’s adamant knocking upon my door yesterday.
It being just noon, I was still foetal under a downie on the chaise longue; a shelled clam of a man, my bulging eyes peeping out on a fearful dangerous world. I listened.

“Is the old devil in?”

(Please God, do not forsake me now. Stop up my ears!)

“I’m sorry?”
“You will be; is he in?”
“I’m afraid Dr Maroon is incommoded today.”
“Is he pissed?”
“I really don’t think…”
“No, you probably don’t. Is he fearful pissed?”
“You cannot measure genius by such a yardstick.”
“Oh yes I can. Where is he?”

There was a two second absence of sound, then eager footsteps. Christ, she’s coming this way! Duck! Incoming!

“There you are. Or are you? Why are you trembling?”
“Clarissa.”
“Stop croaking.”
“I may feel like it but I hadn’t thought to croak just yet.”
“Yes, très drôle. Your voice, what has happened to it?”
“I have been singing.”

She stared at me an uncomfortable minute then busied herself at the sideboard. There is no finer sound than the preparation of a complex drink by an expert.

“Drink this.”
“What is it?”

Another uncomfortable minute and perhaps the beginnings of an impish smile.

“A cure.”
“Some verse springs to mind.”
“What? ‘The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.’?”
“No, I was thinking of ‘…And when the Angel with his darker draught, Draws up to Thee - take that, and do not shrink.’.”

My hand reached out of its own volition.

I see I haven't lost my touch.
What day is it and where is Clarissa?

I can’t keep it in! I want to tell everyone, shout it from the rooftops!
Not five hours since, the most beautiful and magnificent human being it has been my privilege to know, paid the singular honour of asking if I would join them in perhaps the most sacred adventure remaining to me.
To say I am overjoyed would be an obscenity.
I am jubilant!
It is fitting that you, my dearest friends, should be the first to know.
It was here after all, on these unworthy pages, that I tentatively introduced the individual in question. There was some friction at the time, I remember, a natural anxiety that my attention was being diverted from you, but nay, for my part, that was never the case. At any rate, we are a family at peace again, all water under the bridge and I hope you will join me in offering a Cape to Rio welcome.
I know you will.
I have been engaged previously in similarly uncertain circumstances but I have given my assurance this time that I will not drop the ball.
James (Jimmy) McGlinchey, the Cumbernauld Cat, wants me as his ghost writer! That’s right! ME! Can you believe it? I haven’t slept.

Three nights in another town.

Jimmy Page kept a better hotel room. I was not embarrassed by the premium TV channels on the bill but £14.40 extra for laundering the bed linen was a first. Just desperate. Desperate.

I questioned everything on the bill of course, (Scrooge) big mistake. They would not listen to me as I tried to explain that the stains were chocolate. Just that. Chocolate: and how I had obviously fallen asleep on a Fry’s Chocolate Cream.

I was mortified, just mortified.

I don’t think they approved of my torn carrier bag of munchies on the second night either. A trail of Monster Munch and Wotsits across the lobby floor will exasperate the most taciturn of concierges. I had an excuse; before leaving Perthshire I had been given some top notch pollen to try out and had developed an insatiable appetite for corn based snacks at around 4 am.

Le weekend had gone so well up till then: the very best of company (a truly magnificent woman) copious strong drinks and a benign city eager to welcome us.

What day is it now? Thursday, right? Jesus. 72 hours.

72 hours and that’s me just coming round, that is to say, able to face a hair of the dog.

Where was I? Why, Heaven of course: dolts!

I promise to explain.

She's a local girl, "Our Shirley"
You can tell. Wee ferrety face, attitude, skinny, I like her.
Fab song, she wrote it, good band too.
Yes, cheers me up.
I have spoken!

On the twentieth day of the month I made an amazing resolution. Life in my leisure hours had been strenuous during the whole of September and most of October, so when I awoke with another frightful hangover, I decided emphatically to abstain for the duration. Teetotal.

I had to tell someone.

“Teetotal!” exclaimed Mrs Pouncer, much shocked. “You shouldn’t joke about such things and you in the throes of a hangover. Surely a hair of the dog at dinner?”
“Not one drop.”
“Tut tut Achilles, one glass of wine.” she persisted.
“Not even if it was champagne. My mind’s made up. Drink is a curse and I’m done with it for I can’t stand it.”
“Nobody is asking you to stand it, I’ll get them.” she explained, “I am not without means.”
“It’s no odds,” I said “not another drop will I taste –“
“Stop, stop!” she interrupted, more shocked than ever, “Don’t say anything rash for you might be struck down dead and then you’d be sorry for what you said. Do you mean to tell me that you are going teetotal altogether?”
“Hardly. I’m not that desperate, I wouldn’t care to go all that length, but I’m going to be teetotal until Martinmas.”
“Well I think you foolish Achilles,” she said, “October of all months. Why, summer is hardly over and Christmas is coming. Could you not put it off for a more sensible time?”
“No, October is the month for me, forbye, it’s half over. I tell you I’m thraiped with it.”
“How do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s neither muckling nor mickling.” I explained.
“Are you taking a rise out of me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well just talk as your mother and father brought you up to talk then. Now sither, we won’t go over the ins and outs of this, but I think I aught to talk to your mother. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, hanging my head.
“Well don’t look like you’ve lost a shilling and found a sixpence, you’re not dead yet. Straighten up! Now sither, you’re not a young man, you have a long way to go, but you can’t do it by thisen. Think on.”

She left me feeling she had said something sage and shrewd although I was unable to fathom quite what she was getting at. It took a couple of drinks before I understood.

Daphne reminds us how much easier it is to rise than fall. For many, the very prospect of modified cloth cutting is too much and they hang themselves (quite ingeniously) in the front hall stairwell.
A young neighbour of mine did that. I discussed it with my closest friend.*

“Why d’ya think he did it? There must have been an alternative.”
“He was tired. He couldn’t face starting again. There was no alternative.”

I love when laymen give an opinion on economics. Small business men are the best. They come out with the funniest remarks. What they never consider is that they are testing predictions against an intelligent system. They haven’t a hope.

*My closest friend lies buried in the ash pits of Lanarkshire, put there by his lazy doltish family.

For Inkspot

Three Deborah Kerrs in Colonel Blimp and three here at

Cape to Rio

I know which is my favourite.

Because I'm Worth it.