“And so the native hue of Resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought...

I don’t think I’ve ever kept a New Year’s Resolution in my life. In 1995 (I think) I knocked off the booze until January 19th, and in my childhood, having fallen into the habit of using a mildly racist insult I had picked up from schoolmates, I resolved to eschew the word, only for it to slip out in a moment of vexation on 27th December.

Of course we know it’s pointless, but the effort has to be made. Without the occasional well-prepared thrust of abnormal will-power, no alterations to one’s course along the primrose path which leads to the everlasting bonfire will ever be made, and enterprises of great pith and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action, which is certainly what happens to all of mine. One needs a peg to hang these things on, otherwise they won't happen, and the New Year fills the bill. Otherwise, life turns into a slow and drawn-out suicide, in the sense that one is likely to have as little to show for the next twenty years as if one were to top oneself tonight.

So here goes once more for Cipriano’s 2008 rezzos. Not normally given to either self-hatred or schizophrenia, but I will wage a bitter and ruthless war of extermination against roughly one-sixth of myself. I will more than decimate myself. I will wipe the useless and parasitic minority of human cells colonising my waistline off the face of the earth. The pathetic remnants which survive will be strictly confined within the bonds of a 38 inch trouser waist, with a 36 held in reserve as a terrible warning.

And the second is linked to it; I will take action to raise the siege of my poor beleaguered liver. It will get an extended cease-fire from the massed artillery of alcohol, to allow for regeneration. Besides, that’s the only way I can think of to achieve objective 1. I’ve tried everything else, even exercise.

Then there is the usual list of books to write, money to be made, one divorce to digest, another to avoid, just like last year and most of the last forty; nothing new, though one or two things are coming into sharper focus.

For instance, I will spend this year doing more of the things I enjoy doing, and less of the ones I don't. Sounds sorta obvious, until one looks at it. We spend far too much time doing unenjoyable things because we've accepted that we've got to without properly examining the evidence for this belief, or because we can't get our arse in gear to make the necessary plans to do enjoyable stuff instead. No more of that. No doubt 2008 will have its share of unpleasant duties, but each duty will have to declare itself and prove its case against a shit-hot advocatus diaboli before it is accepted as such. And fun will become the default setting. Believe me, that will be more difficult than laying off the booze. Or tell me I'm a liar.

Nobody’s fault my arse

And so another small child has been killed by the family rottweiler. How many does that make this year exactly?

Of course we are told the family pet had never shown the slightest degree of aggression before. "This wasn't expected, it's nobody's fault," said the detective superintendent in charge of the case.

Well, I give him credit for not wanting to stick the boot in to a family already suffering deeply from the consequences of a catastrophic misjudgement, but hang on a minute. The dog was a rottweiler, for heaven’s sake. I know very little about dogs, but I do know - and so does everybody else - that rottweilers are prone to turn extremely dangerous at the slightest provocation, such as an ignorant and uncoordinated baby sticking its fingers everywhere. “Wasn’t expected”? Senior police officers should be sensitive, but shouldn’t be allowed to talk complete bollocks.

Yes, you get experts on the TV saying that the breed is not intrinsically dangerous – it’s not banned by the Dangerous Dogs Act – and is perfectly harmless if handled properly. Banning more breeds would be wrong because it would apply to everybody, even the sensible dog-handlers. But not banning breeds applies to everybody too, including the sort of family which sprouts fatherless babies like this one, whose mother was 17. And the police and press aren’t allowed to ask questions like “Whose idea was it to introduce a rottweiler into this family, and why?” We all know it’s likely to have been some spotty herbert with a suet dumpling for a brain who thought it might boost his credibility as a bit of a hard man. Well, it wasn’t nobody’s fault, it was his. What we need is not so much a Dangerous Dogs Act – it’s no good blaming them – but a Dangerous Chavs Act.

Big Brother ain’t half watching you

Bizarre occurrence this morning. Having woken up at a normalish time for once, I decided to go out for a brisk walk in the Trough of Bowland, as part of my no-doubt-doomed attempt to lose a bit of weight. I drove a fairly complicated route to the village of Quernmore, about six miles away, and stopped the car outside the village post office. As I got out in order to tramp up the hill, a man who had stopped behind me got out of his car and addressed me. Though not aware of having given any cause for road rage, I braced myself for it. But the man addressed me with perfect courtesy, saying “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Mera” – how the hell could anyone in Quernmore, where I’d never been before, know my name? “but I have to give you this.” Of course, it was a set of legal papers served on me at the behest of the Bitch. You have to hand it to these process servers, they are bloody assiduous. He had clearly arrived at my home just in time to see me driving off, and followed me. It would have been a bit of a laugh if I had driven 160 miles without stopping to my mother’s, as I had done a couple of days before. Anyway, he got his man. Ironically, the papers were just copies of papers I’d already received through the post, so it hadn’t actually been necessary to follow me out into the Trough of Bowland to serve them. But heigh-ho, I’m not paying for it. I wonder how much all this overkill is costing her, and she still hasn’t been told that one of the documents was illegally obtained and could lay her open to criminal prosecution.

English football goes Italian

No, I have nothing whatsoever to say about Fabio Capello, beyond wishing him all the best with the bunch of dumb-arsed infantilised wankers at his disposal. It’s more sinister than that. A year or so ago, when it was discovered that Italian football was riddled with corruption, we no doubt first composed the odd bon mot about the Pope’s faith and the sanitary habits of bears, and then reflected that that sort of thing wouldn’t happen here. I’m not so sure.

Obviously “we wuz robbed” is the classic response of anyone who loses a football match, but I surely can’t be the first person to have noted the run of refereeing decisions which have pulled Chelsea out of the mire at various junctures this season. As a Liverpool fan I naturally called the referee all manner of opprobrious names when Chelsea equalised at Anfield from a completely fictitious penalty at the very beginning of the season (he actually apologised afterwards); but my saner self reflected that these things happen, and that referees aren’t bent and it usually evens itself out in time. But now? In the week after Christmas we saw a very dodgy penalty and sending off after a Covent-Garden-worthy dive by Micky Bollocks when Chelsea were 2-0 down, and then a last-minute Chelsea winner against Newcastle scored by Salomon Kalou when he was about half a mile offside. A pattern is emerging. Generally we have sensibly rejected any such suggestions, knowing that fair football is likely to bring in much more money in the long term than fixed stuff, and that Englishmen realise this, but these chaps aren’t English, are they? Not being racist here, just culturalist. Russians possess neither the most rudimentary sense of morality nor any tendency to take the long view – money is best grabbed quickly because the future is uncertain. I say Roman Abramovich and his cronies are bribing Premiership referees. At the very least let’s tax the non-doms out of London.

Quite Staggering Christmas Ill-will

I hold no brief for Tony Blair. I voted for him twice and couldn’t stomach doing so a third time. I left his party entirely because of his leadership. I could go on for some time about the man’s failings. But I don’t think I could have worked up quite such gouts of bile as the right wing of the Catholic Church has , following his reception into the Roman Church a couple of days ago. It made me feel that Blair must be quite a saintly man. I’m sure that, even were I not inclined to do so anyway, I would have told Uncle Joe Ratzinger where he could stick his magisterium after this treatment.

There is a blog where these graceless ultramontanes congregate. I read it because it’s interesting and about interesting subjects, and even contribute to it when feeling confident enough not to mind being told I’m going to Hell. The general line – there are exceptions, but they risk fierce execration – is that it is an utter scandal that Blair has been allowed to join the church without giving public recantations of his position on abortion (natch), homosexuality, and anything else that what I call the Khartoum faction demands a recantation on. The fact that Blair has (one assumes) never performed or been responsible for an abortion or (again presumably) engaged in homosexual relations is neither here nor there. Nor has he been personally responsible for widening access to abortion – what he is being blamed for is not narrowing it, and not actually ensuring that women are put in jail for doing it. A doctrinal paper drawn up by none other than one J. Ratzinger, in a previous job, states that only politicians who persistently vote for increased abortion should be condemned by the Church. I don’t know why Blair didn’t vote for a reduction in the time limit on abortions (I mean, the man has four children – hasn’t he ever seen an ultrasound scan?) but, presumably, if he had, he’d still have voted for some legal abortions, and the ultramontanes would still have condemned him.

You'd think Catholics would be glad to have Tony Blair; not because he's an international celeb, but in the spirit of welcoming a lost sheep back to the fold. Jesus didn't go round demanding public recantations; he just said "Go and sin no more" - no doubt more in hope than confidence, the Man wasn't stupid.

It is obvious that these people simply do not like Tony Blair, which I can understand. But the main reason they don’t like him is that he is a left-of-centre politician; the same blog carries attacks on US bishops who are indulgent to the Kennedys. It would seem the only politicians with whom the Church hierarchy ought to be hobnobbing are the likes of Generals Franco and Pinochet, who got off notably lightly. Generally speaking the Catholic Church has always believed in making its accommodations with secular power, in support of its own claims to temporal as well as spiritual authority. It just prefers torturers and rapists to people who are liberal on poor women who see no alternative to abortion. What’s more, I suspect that some of these people do not actually believe in the substance of the Christian faith: the fundamentalist wing are merely a useful tool to mobilise Catholics in support of political objectives, these objectives being inimical to liberal democracy and having a stronger connection to a political philosophy beginning with F. Titus Oates, where are you now that we need you?

I know the original Cipriano Mera rejected all religion: partly because the only one on offer where he was was the utterly corrupt, decayed and politicised Spanish Catholic Church, which deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth. But I do not think I am departing much from his spirit when I say that Britain must remain, not a wholly secular country, but a Christian (C of E) country. A secular country would have to give equal status to all its religions: no. We have an established religion which places liberal tolerance very high in its list of values. It deserves to be placed higher than the homophobic abortion-fetishists; higher than the gynocidal sharia-boppers, and higher than all those who use their religion to enforce cultural norms on the unwilling. No, C of E for ever: the absurdity of the supremacy of the woolly and über-tolerant is precisely the point. Let’s hear it once more for Antidisestablishmentarianism.

Been away from the blogosphere for a few days – largely because I was away visiting the city of X (sorry to sound like a 19th century novel, but I have to protect privacy) seeing two of my dearest friends. Two hugely different men moving in profoundly different circles (though they themselves are good friends) and providing two very different but equally valuable takes on life. Let’s call them Q and Z, to be very slightly original.

Q is a prosperously proportioned professional gentleman who appears outwardly to epitomise the comfortable bourgeoisie, but manages not to have internalised any of the attendant bullshit. He has a standard-size family, with two children who have real personalities and are awesomely bright, but have equally clearly not been brought up to compete with the neighbours, get into Eton or end up in an investment bank; they have simply grown up with parents who have a lot of interests and take the trouble to draw the kids into them. (I think I can modestly claim to have done the same with my own.) At Q’s house one gets a warm welcome, loads of booze and massively diverse conversation, but no sense of having to mind a preconceived set of Ps and Qs. At my age shittiness is so all-pervasive that its absence is immediately and powerfully noticeable, like the sensation of stopping banging your head against a wall.

Z is equally widely knowledgeable and diverse in his interests, but his life has taken a completely different path. Debarred from the bourgeoisie by a complete inability to fit in with its rules and practices, he moves among those who have similarly fallen off the edge, though keeping quite a tight rein on his own life; his acquaintance teaches him, after all, what awful fate attends those who let go. Our pub-crawl took us to places frequented by people who have served time for anything up to and including murder (Z, who is no sort of hard man, is known and loved there and thus as safe as if attended by an SAS phalanx) and it ended in the company of a friend of Z’s who was excellent company, but with whom I was rather glad to have been vouched for, as it were. Z’s friend had just returned from the wake of another of Z’s extended acquaintance, and was far from sober, exhorting the virtues of Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin as heroes of the 20th century.

We were joined by two ladies in early middle age who were mourning the death of yet another friend – funerals and wakes play a devastatingly large part in the lives of people in their forties in this milieu – and who were drunk, weepy and utterly charming. One of them came on to me to an extent that might have caused difficulties, especially as she evoked powerful memories of a princesse lointaine of thirty years back. In the end the ladies simply swept out in an alcoholic haze, and considerable firmness was necessary to escape from Z’s friend’s demand for a continuation of the symposium.

It was all very Irvine Welsh, and I mean that without a trace of disrespect. C S Lewis said, admiringly, of an unsuccessful friend of his that “he despised nobody”, and that is true of Z (actually it isn’t – he despises himself, with no good reason that I can see, but at least that fact prevents him from despising anybody else) and, I rather patronisingly hope, of myself.

Finally, a rather wonderful link, for which I must credit my friend The Exile (see Links): here

Yes! Victory in Sight....

You know that feeling you get, in sport, politics or whatever, when you see your opponent make a mistake that leaves the goal open, the wicket undefended, the queen en prise etc.? Well, I've just come across one in my court battle with the Queen Bitch over all my money. Among the documents that she's presenting to the court in support of her case is one which I know to have been obtained illegally (i.e. stolen) - and (oh joy!) I can prove it. Silly cow - no connection with rationality at all. I rather pity her lawyers who've been told a lot of lies which will stand up in court about as well as me with a bottle of scotch inside me. Still, they're getting paid, and since when have lawyers worried about getting paid for talking a lot of shite?