Who'llbuttertheparsnips?

Coming to a screen near you, very, very soon ...

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky

Ever read a book that hacked you off so much that you were seriously tempted to throw it at the wall in a towering rage?

Well, I have just finished a classic of this sadly under-rated genre.  Sadly I can’t go ahead and smash it straight into the gob of the anaglypta like nature never intended, mainly because I made the mistake of downloading the damn thing onto my Kindle.  It’s not exactly fair of me to blame the poor contraption for a mistake on the part of my own pathetic powers of judgement, so to save time and effort, I won’t.

Yeah, it was me wot dun it, all by meself, no help and no messin.

All I will say in my defence is that I wish the proprietors of those sites that you can download free legal e-books from would make it easier for you to browse through them first.  If only they had, then perhaps all this stress and strain on my poor, over-stretched nerves could have been avoided.

It’s called One Year At The Russian Court: 1904-1905 and penned by an extremely superficial and highly pretentious aristo named Renee Elton Maud (and no, she can’t  have the little accent floating above the second e in her first name, the silly bint.  I don’t care if she was originally French, the bloody book’s in English and that’s one of those languages that do without such dainty affectations.).

Like Jill Tweedie’s first husband Count Istvan (he’s not getting one either, so tough), she was naturally enough a member of Europe’s haut noblesse.  In other words, she insists she is closely related to just about every other member of it going – and boy, is she determined not to let you forget it! 

Just three sentences in, and she’s already beefing up her ‘devoted’ grandma, giving name, rank, serial number, together with a rather involved explanation to the effect that although nan considers Russia to be ‘her’ country, she was actually born in London while her dad was serving at the Russian embassy there.  Dad’s next posting was in Copenhagen, where he remained for the next 20 years, refusing to move away from the company of all his besties (including the King and Queen, naturally) to any other posting.  Yet unlike today, he didn’t get the sack or a demotion.  Instead the Tsar decided to indulge him in his little whim, presumably on the grounds that a man so well thought of by the monarchs and everyone else who was anyone in Copenhagen society must have the clout to do the job properly.  This would tend to suggest that much of his work must have consisted of socialising and networking, rather than filling in forms and bailing out skint student backpackers.

Then we hear all about the Queen of Denmark giving a diamond bracelet to Renee’s grandma, who just happened to be so exotically half-French on her mother’s side, nee Princesse de Broglie-Revel (just the sort of name sported in previous centuries by some raddled old rouge pot back in the 1770s who filled in for Madame du Barry during the wrong time of the month, yet criticised Marie Antoinette for falling off the back of her mule using the wrong etiquette).  

Obviously the name alone is meant to be conjured with.  I, not being a society woman (real or aspiring) of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, haven’t a clue who she was.  And I really couldn’t care less, either.  In the words of Figaro: “You just took the trouble to be born – nothing more.”         

It all reminds me irresistibly of Jill Tweedie’s account of Istvan taking her on a protracted honeymoon across Europe to stay with one of his relatives after another.  Like Istvan, Renee has rellies all over the bloody place – and like his, none of them seem to belong to one single country or place.  God only knows whose side they fought on in the war.  Jill accused her husband’s relatives of lacking loyalty to country or cause.  Their only concern was themselves and all the traditional benefits accruing to their class.  Like Renee, Istvan regarded such a viewpoint as only right and proper.  When Jill declared that that sort of attitude made them corrupt and decadent social parasites, he loftily informed her she shouldn’t be ‘so bourgeois’.

As the perfect representative of the middle classes, Jill felt uncomfortable staying with Istvan’s relatives for too long.  She always used to worry that she and her husband would prove a drain on his family’s resources, or distract them away from their work, study and other pressing concerns and obligations.  Renee’s little mind is not at all troubled by such frivolous concerns.  Her family are happy to have her come to stay with them in Russia for an entire year.  And of course their influence helps her to sail straight through customs without having her luggage examined in any shape or form.  She smugly congratulates herself on the brilliant achievement of making the other travellers feel quite envious.  (How many rocks of top notch crack she may or may not have smuggled in her vanity case goes sadly unrecorded.)

An ‘amusing incident’ occurs when the train arrives at Gatchina.  She and her companions stared out of the window at the Grand Duke Nicholas Michaelovitch, who was forced to dash into a side room at the station to change out of his civilian mufti and into the uniform suitable to his exalted rank.  A number of such incidents occur during the course of the book, always to people endowed with a splendid title and venerable old name.  Many of these incidents I cannot even understand, never mind laugh at, due to my total lack of social training.  Sorry, but I’m simply not comme au fait with all the requisite nuances, so there was no point in her including them.  When Renee witters on about such exciting and vital topics as the way in which posh Russkies should behave when people are presented to them, I immediately pass into a heavy slumber.

People who possess definite national and ethnic identities nearly always seem to hail from a different social class to her.  Therefore they do not matter in the great scheme of things, and only occur as a means of quaint window dressing to convey the expected ‘exotic’ flavour.  Such ‘characters’ include the Russian coachman who comes to collect them from the station when they first arrive in the country, the Persian merchants who run shops in the middle of Tblisi and a caravan of camel traders seen traipsing through the desert in the environs of Baku.

Although Istvan seemed to be equally fluent and at ease in the language of practically every country where his relatives lived, Renee isn’t.  Despite managing to pick up a number of basic Russian terms for things, such as drozky, she never even bothers to get round to trying to learn a bit of the actual language.  I suppose this would be because at this time Russian was still to some extent regarded as the language of the ‘people’, rather than the aristocracy.  As a result, her aunt can speak ‘perfect’ French, English and German, but not Russian.  Her knowledge of it is so bad that she prefers never to speak it in society, for fear she’ll be laughed at (or possibly dismissed as ‘a bit common’).  And as her aunt and everyone else she mixes with in Russian society all speak the very best of French, there’s no need for Renee to bother getting her pretty little head round the Cyrillic alphabet, never mind the horrors of perfective and imperfective forms of verbs and the glory that is the Russian case system. (So how did Pushkin end up such a genius writer?  Because his peasant Russian nanny just happened to be a master storyteller who taught him that the Russian language was something to be proud of.)

At one point she takes a leisurely trip to Georgia.  Georgia, for those of you who don’t know, used to be a quaint little theme park attached to the Russian empire for the express purpose of taking a holiday in.  Or at least that is the way Renee comes to think of it. Of course auntie is so rich and well-connected that she owns more than one thumping great mansion in Georgia alone.  Not only does she boast the main one in Tblisi, she also has a cute little weekend palace in the neighbourhood of Sukhumi.  Unfortunately, due to a teensy bit of civil unrest in the immediate vicinity, they are unable to go and stay there.  As the unrest does not seem to have involved the participation of aristos in any shape or form, Renee considers it of no further interest, so we don’t get to learn what it was all about and why.

During her stay, Renee claims that she met everyone who was anyone (ie all the usual suspects).  All the eligible young men seem to be dashing young officers in the army.  They can’t be doing an awful lot of work, though, as they are able and willing to engage in the full social round of Tblisi every night of the week.  A typical evening would involve going out for a meal in a restaurant, followed by a trip to the theatre (plays in French and Russian only, no Georgian, though they did exist at this time) and then on to a dance at somebody or other’s house.  In the daytime, she and her aunt pay visits or receive them.  Once their social obligations are fufilled, they go and visit all the hackneyed old tourist sites or do the odd bit of voluntary work. 

Yes, it’s a tough old life – but someone’s got to do it!   

Now, this is all very well - or not, depending on whether or not you happen to be a decrepit aristo-wannabe who crooks out your little finger whenever you take a dish of tea or a frankly cringe-making bourgieous upstart like me who attends a radical-minded institute of further education that not only encourages women to ride bicycles but obtain degrees and agitate for the vote - but what the hell has it all got to do with Leon Trotsky?

According t, o Renee's account, Rasputin and the Bolsheviks between them have done a mighty fine job of screwing up the fantasy funland of the entire Russian empire.  Torn away from her fluffy little reminiscences by the great sweeping panorama of history, she is forced to devote the last couple of chapters of the book to a discussion of serious matters.

Some of what she says about Rasputin is just plain bloody wrong.  But then, to be strictly fair, all sorts of lurid rumours seem to have been doing the rounds in polite Russian society at this time - and either her relatives didn't know or talk to anyone who did  possess the most accurate and up-to-date information about the Mad Monk, or maybe they thought the true story was far too shocking and outrageous for a nice young lady like her to hear.

Meanwhile, Trotsky gets it from both barrels.  Not only is he bourgeoius, intellectual AND a member of the Reds who've just emerged from under the beds - he's JEWISH!  And his real name just happens to be Bronstein!  (Kerensky is also a right pain in the arse, in her expert opinion, being bourgeious, intellectual AND Jewish - but at least he's only a socialist who's always gone by his original name.)

Renee, of course, just like the late sainted Tsar Nick himself, is firmly of the belief that your ordinary Russian peasant is far too stupid, childish and politically inexperienced to be able to rule himself or make any healthy, appropriate decisions about how he might like his country run.  Being so deeply religious and superstitious by nature, he needs a ruler from the same faith as himself to keep him in line.  

If it wasn't for all these Bolshie Jewish eggheads running round fomenting trouble in the ranks, the peasants and workers would never have even dreamed of kicking off, no matter how unhappy they felt or how impossible life in the Russian empire might have become.  

It's at times like these that you start wondering just what Renee would have made of Stalin and his purges ...

        

Here's one I made earlier

Can't believe that there are people out there who earn a bloody good living retailing cobblers like this, so I just HAD to share it with you! 

According to these people who claim to channel messages from alleged extra-terrestrial entities, ‘Shan’ is the name that some of the aliens give to the Earth (ie that planet that we live on, to quote Leela from Futurama).

Shan/Earth has got such a bad reputation that spaceships from other worlds are said to have come here in their droves, not just to protect the rest of the universe from our nefarious influence, but also to defeat the powers of Satan himself, while doing the best they can manage to reform us.  In other words, life on Earth is Borstal on roller-skates. 

Happily Shan made enough progress during the first half of the 20^th century to have been permitted to move from the third dimension to the fourth.  Now, do please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought we already lived in both the third and fourth dimensions?  After all, modern physics defines width as the third dimension and time as the fourth – both of which have been pretty integral parts of our universe, at least ever since I’ve been here on this current go-round.

And who exactly decided that we could move up, anyway? Obviously not the Home Secretary or an astro-physicist.

Anyway, starting on 17 August 1987, the Earth was led (precisely how I don’t know, so please don’t ask me.  I am not one of those privileged to have a direct line to the rulers of the cosmos) no less than 13 million light years into an orbit closer to the Great Central Sun (of where?  The universe?  How do they know that the universe has a centre and where it is?  We should be told!).

Ah, sorry, hang on a second.  It says here (Extraordinary Encounters by Jerome Clark) that ‘millions’ of starships used ‘powerful magnetic beams’ to transfer Shan to another solar system in the Pleiades.  The process was completed on 15 December 1995.  The Earth is now the fourth planet in the orbit of the star Coeleno.

So how come nobody down here noticed anything funny going on?

Now this is where this blue-sky concept gets really clever.

The extra-terrestrials felt that we might find such a radical change of habitat a bit disturbing and bad for the nerves, so they went to great lengths to conceal their operation.  The sky around us has been specially arranged to look just the way it did before the move.  All the old stars and planets have been cunningly replaced by an enormous fleet of starships, hovering in just the right configurations.

A few very observant humans have, however, noticed that though the sun is now emitting more intense light, it still looks smaller than it did before.  This is because Shan is seven million miles further away from Coeleno than it was from Sol.  Of course, this also means that our new moon is brighter than the old one.

Before we get moved up into the fourth dimension, all the usual type of devastating cataclysms will sweep across the globe, cleansing the planet of undesirable influences, including Satan and his minions.  Despite being the undisputed evil overlord of creation, the Devil is still thick enough not to notice that the Earth has been moved by the space-men!  

So, we’ve got a lot to look forward to this December.

Terrestrial scientists, on the other hand, agree that it is safe to buy a diary for 2013 and start pencilling in all the important dates for next year, including your income tax returns.

Naughty rude words

Back on Monday, I decided to pop into Blackwells bookshop on the university campus during my lunchbreak.

Shortly after I'd got myself nicely settled in a comfy chair with a good book, the woman sitting opposite asked if I could help her.

"Yes, no problem," I replied.

"You see, I'm slightly dyslexic," she went on, "and I sometimes have a problem with certain words."

The book she was reading just happened to be Fifty Shades Of Grey.

"PLEASE don't let it be a rude word, PLEASE don't let it be a rude word!" I silently pleaded.

The word turned out to be 'anticipated'.

The one after that was the rude one.

I just happened to be reading about the deplorable private lives of the ancient Roman emperors at the time, so I suppose she thought I wouldn't mind.

It's all in the title

Insomnia has struck once again, so I've been waking up at 3 o'clock most mornings and worrying about the state of the country/world/solar system/universe/my bank balance.

In an attempt to divert my mind from such apocalyptically overwhelming (not to mention pointless) trains of thought, I have been working out some attention-grabbing titles for potential future posts.

Here's what I've managed to come up with so far:

*  A Gallonful Of Arse-Gravy
*  A Little Light Goethe
*  Frumpy Shoes For Frumpy People

Now I've just got to write the articles to accompany them.

Wish me luck, fans!

The crepe list continued

Yes, you can take it as read.  There are even more aspects of modern life that seriously get on my non-existent knackers.  And because I had neither the time nor the inclination to look at them in the original Crepe List post, I thought I might as well put together a follow-up now.  (Cheap, tacky and obvious move I know, but hey, flankers always sell well in cinemas, sweet shops and perfume halls.)

So here they are, again, in no particular order:

Drippy hippies running in slow motion through waist-high meadows of wild flowers against a soundtrack of sensitive singer-songwriters crooning fey paens to childhood friendship whilst strumming a single acoustic guitar – when the mobile phone network in question continues to send you computerised invoices carefully itemising every last text you sent to your ex when you felt ‘tired and emotional’ last Friday night. Don’t forget that these multi-national conglomerates intent on grabbing every last penny of your cash used to advertise themselves as looming behemoth Laputas mistaken for invading UFOs on RAF radar screens back during the Eighties.

Keep calm and carry on posters – why the hell have these Second World War relics from

the Central Office of Information’s attic clear-out become so popular of late? Presumably because they are easy to turn into mugs, tea towels and the sort of ‘ironic’ retro poster that Nathan Barley and co consider an absolute hoot to hang up on the wall of the office boardroom. No-one these days takes this sort of stark, stoical, uncompromising attitude to life at all seriously (hence the existence of such bleary miseries on the literary landscape as Liz Jones). The only variants on this theme that I like at all are: ‘I will not keep calm – and you can fuck off’ (have saved a copy of this on my mobile to make me cackle when times is hard) and ‘Now scream your head off and freak out’ (not managed to track down one of these for my mobile as of yet – though we live in hope)

David Cameron – ugly, moon-faced, ubiquitous windbag of an utter non-entity – yet somehow he’s managed to find himself in charge of our entire country. Just what is the point of his existence, apart from helping to pay the mortgages of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton? Bloody big mortgages to keep going in such financially straitened times as these, is all I can say. Move to a cardboard box on the Norfolk Broads. You know it makes sense!

Spray tans – so walking about drenched in stray off-cuts of reject caramel is supposed to make me more attractive to the opposite sex, is it? I know human beings come in a huge range of colours and finishes, but Tango-Dorito E-number orange is not exactly a Pantone I ever remember encountering in nature.

Pod being a hip, happenin’ sort of suffix for desirable new products (like state-of-the-art computer technology, cool coffee-shops on Islington High Street frequented by urban bike-riding Guardian readers, offices constructed entirely out of plate glass and steel girders so that the inmates end up feeling like tomatoes in a greenhouse every time the sun comes out) – ‘pods’ are what beans live in as they develop to maturity. It doesn’t matter whether they are coffee, vanilla or green. End of story.

Stacks of false eyelashes adorning women’s faces – sorry, but I don’t happen to be either a drag-queen or Ermintrude the cow from The Magic Roundabout. And while Scandinavian-style paper cut-out ones showing the outlines of birds perching on top of chimney pots might well be a work of art, they’ll still peel off and fall straight into your mug of skinny latte the first time you ever wear them, so I wouldn’t bother shelling out that £29.99 in Liberty if I were you.

Britain is great fever – in that case, why all the jokes about sending your rubbish to France? And how comes it was Roger Federer who won the Men’s Singles at Wimbledon for the seventh bloody time? (I’ll say this for him, though – if he hadn’t bagged the title, then it’s guaranteed that Andy Murray would have been given a knighthood in the next Queen’s honours list.) Plus we seem to have conveniently forgotten that, in normal years, some of the most vociferous advocates of bellowing patriotism are football hooligans, extreme right-wing Fascist nutters, Daily Mail readers – and punks taking the piss during tough times. Are you sure you want to be associated with any of these people?

Spanx knickers – aka ‘pull-you-in’ knickers. So you’ve been following the maple syrup and lemon juice diet for the past month and a half, yet you still haven’t managed to rid yourself of that last teaspoon of stubborn cellulite on your bum? Fear not, control underwear is here to hoist you into shape for that red carpet photo-opportunity. Now no-one but you need ever know your dirty little secret – you’re fat!!!!!!!! If someone like me pulls a pair of these vicious piranha knickers on, they simply redistribute the flab. The laws of physics state that energy cannot be created or destroyed – and neither can wobble. So your spare tyres are forced to migrate to sunnier climes – your neck and your knees. Aren’t you glad nobody has ever heard of you, so that no pictures of you appear on the front of Heat magazine with a circle drawn round the offending portion of blubber together with the accompanying caption accusing you of ‘letting yourself go’?

Tons of black eyeliner – in case you hadn’t already noticed, I’m not Amy Winehouse. And I’m not modelling cheeky little polka-dot prom dresses designed to showcase my ‘magnificent bangers’ in the after segment of a Gok Wan make-over, either. Nor am I sleeping with Don Draper in the office stationery cupboard when I’m not typing up letter after wonderful letter for him in the typing pool. Let’s get the photocopier on the case!

‘I’m going on a journey’ type formats for documentaries – always fancied a holiday in the Galapagos Islands or a cruise aboard the QEII, yet have never had enough moolah ready to afford it? All you need to do is get commissioned to write and present your very own documentary. All real-life programmes automatically triple their appeal to the viewers once they can offer a few pretty (and aspirational) backgrounds, so chuck your cute little knitted beanie on and start thinking of some nifty links between the death of neutron stars and a trip round the Galapagos Islands via the QEII. Hint to any glamorous lady intellectuals out there nurturing a humongous crush on Professor Brian Cox – just arrange to pass by a convenient glacier or iceberg whilst wearing your best padded parka – and he’ll get winched in by helicopter to join you. Guaranteed!

Knackered and clapped out

If anybody out there is wondering where the hell I've been and what the bollock I've been doing since you last heard from me, just give me a chance to explain.

Over the course of the past month I have:

1.)  Undergone an operation at the Christie Hospital
2.)  Passed my MA course with a Distinction
3.)  Finished learning the Georgian alphabet
4.)  Been stricken with a horrible virus
5.)  Suffering from post-viral exhaustion

I am afraid that I also looked up 'steam cleaning teeth' on Google - and discovered that that stupid old ratbag Liz Jones happens to be telling the truth about this rather esoteric sounding health and beauty treatment.  However, you'll be glad to hear that no way am I daft enough to actually sign up for a course of it.

And of course I haven't forgotten the lovely Dr Frogg.

So just relax and give me a break, would you?