A Headful of Stars.

I was just lying on the balcony with my daughter after breakfast (cereal for her, toast for me). She looked up at the high-rise opposite, at the crowded nest of aerials on the roof. Space rocket, she said. Then she looked at the next block over, another mighty omphalos crowded with aerials. Look, she said, another space rocket. It was a lovely bit of magical thinking, I thought, which time-machined me right back to when I was a kid, when I thought anyone who did repair work on a TV aerial was inherently mysterious, quasi-magical. These people climbed up to the highest points in my infant world and communed with the magical forces that brought me the Daleks and Doctor Who. They were practically spacemen themselves, up there, sifting through the ether, talking to stars. 

The Rubicons of Parenthood.

No one tells you this, but you don't become a parent overnight. It happens in stages. Terrible incremental stages, rubicons you cross and across which you can never return. These stages are marked by the things you say – things that once said cannot be unsaid, the selfsame things you used to hate your parents for saying.

These phrases include:

You can't have any dessert until you finish your vegetables.

Well, where did you last see [insert name of lost object]?

Pick it up yourself. We’re not your servants. (This will subsequently evolve into ‘This house is not a hotel.')

I’m sure there are a lot more, but I haven’t said them yet. Make no mistake, however: I will. It’s inevitable.

Perhaps the worst part of all this is that it’s only when you become a parent that you realise, with a sinking awareness of what an awful brat you were, that there is a mutuality to saying this stuff; you only talk this way because you’re trying to find the most effective way of communicating with something which is basically an idiot. Don’t take this the wrong way, I love my kids, but seriously, right now: idiots. I don’t know, perhaps the real problem is that parents keep using these dumbed-down phrases long after their usefulness has expired. Along with forgetting how to dance and telling crap jokes, this is how you become the quintessence of future embarrassment that will your force your children to pretend they don’t know you in public and, ultimately, leave home and forget your birthday. And quite right, too.

Full Circle.

It's taken almost forty years for my philosophy on life to boil down to something broadly similar to my mum's rule about the living room: you have to leave it in a slightly better state than you found it.

Highlights from the Set Design of the Glass Spider Tour.

I couldn't sleep last night so I ended up debating with myself whether David Bowie somehow rendered himself impervious to the cheesiness of successive generations (patchouli and astrological charts in the sixties, star-shaped glasses and rainbow wigs in the seventies, etc.) by being the great transcendent strange one. But then I remembered the Glass Spider Tour and found the following document. It appears that no one surveyed the Eighties unscathed – no one.

Click to read more ...

The Perfect Indictment of Capitalism.

From the closing scenes of The Constant Gardener (the movie):  

So who has got away with murder? Not, of course, the British government. They merely covered up, as one does, the offensive corpses. Though not literally. That was done by person or persons unknown. So who has committed murder? Not, of course, the highly respectable firm of KDH Pharmaceutical, which has enjoyed record profits this quarter, and has now licensed ZimbaMed of Harare, to continue testing Dypraxa in Africa. No, there are no murders in Africa. Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization, benefits we can afford so easily... because those lives were bought so cheaply.