An Elephant of One's Own

LONG POV SHOT of BEAUTIFUL WOMAN in sexy dress, smiling. ZOOM in quickly on face. SLOW PAN downwards, taking in whole body, ending at feet (impossible heels), pausing slightly at ample cleavage. Saxophone music. POV PULLS BACK quickly, then moves in as BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, still smiling fixedly, holds out hand to greet HELPLACE-ZUCKER. BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: Hello. Mr Helplace-Zucker? Nice to meet you. OK, I think we can all see this for what it is, a trope, that is, a locution or idiom, visual shorthand, unoriginal but serviceable, intended to save time. As with most tropes, individual tastes will vary on just how irritating it is found to be. Me, I always found that tenor sax mildly exasperating, since I do not experience lust as a saxophone playing slow jazz, never have. More as a woodwind section, clarinets and oboes and cor anglais. (Make that corblimey anglais, if it's Joan Sims.) The feminists are right about one thing: the eye behind the camera is like...

If you are as normal, as healthy and well-adjusted as I fear you may be, Dear Reader, the idea of infecting someone will naturally never have occurred to you. How about if I said "influencing people"? You know, the Dale Carnegie thing? Ever wanted to do that? (It's not exactly the same thing, but it's close.) No, of course you never "wanted to" influence anyone. You do it all the time, regardless. You communicate with others, and in your imagination at least, you commune . You share stuff. Perhaps there is a Special Person you commune with, y'know, specially. Assuming you live in the First World, that is (it may surprise you to learn that here in the Third World, the romantic concept of the Special Person never really caught on. Romance needs Hollywood to keep it alive, and Hollywood is almost off the dial in some places). If this is you, then the idea that someone may have gone through their entire life, all fifty-five years of it, without commun...

High on a windswept moor, as far away from people as you can decently get, there is a Research Facility. In it, you will find thousands of dead people in test tubes. Not the people themselves, you understand, not their arms and legs and spleens and all the other messy bits, which have long since decomposed. Their minds. I am not there yet, but soon will be. The last day of my life expectancy hurtles towards me. My lungs have been a joke for quite a while now, but now the joke is spreading. Every day this obscene, rickety, creaking excuse for a body feels less like something to be lived in or through, and more like something to be escaped from. Diogenes may have lived in a barrel, but at least he didn't become one. Lucky Diogenes. I still have a mind - not a particularly good one, but a mind - and thus am a candidate for preservation. (So would you be, if you cared enough about it.) The process, I am given to understand, involves transferring the contents o...

If you're going to read this, read the article first. Make sure you know what you think (agree with, disagree with) before getting on to what I think: I don't want to influence anyone. Done? Good. Now let's begin. First, briefly, the few things I agree with. For convenience, a quick rundown: 1) Agreed that "slut" is a compliment. Always said so . Trouble is, now that it's recognised as such, it will be thrown around like confetti, showered on people who are manifestly unworthy of so sacred a designation. Semantic erosion through overuse, the usual story. Sooner or later we're going to have to invent a new term to honour the priestly caste of women who are blessed with the gift of enjoying sex bareheaded, without the encumbrance of steeple hats and without imposing unrealistic expectations on partners. Suggestions welcome (but don't send them here. Nobody reads this. You may as well send them to Santa Claus). 2) Agreed that when it comes to ...

You may have gathered from the previous post, if you gathered anything at all, that I am not a feminist. "Ohhh, yes you are," the Punch and Judy chorus pipes up, "Look, here, it says in the dictionary..." OK, I seem to have a free paragraph or two, so let's just get that out of the way: If you are a woman scanning the personal columns for a date, and you see an ad from a bloke who defines himself as "Aryan male, 40, single, seeks..." my guess is that you will give this man a wide berth, if you're at all sensible. If you do not, and end up in his bedroom, you would still be well advised to check in his wardrobe for swastika armbands, and my money's on you finding them (try the top drawer of the dresser if not). Now, no one here is claiming that "Aryan" means "Nazi". It doesn't, and no one to my knowledge has ever claimed that it does. As a self-identification (as opposed to, say, an obsolete linguistic term) it presumab...

GRYTPYPE-THYNNE: Good evening. Have a picture of Queen Victoria. NEDDIE SEAGOON: No thanks, I'm trying to give them up. GRYTPYPE: I don't think you'll ever do it, I've tried and failed. May I come in? SEAGOON: But I'm outside.     ( The Goon Show ) Dear Reader. Statistically, the chances are that you are younger than me. Probably quite a bit younger. The chances are overwhelming that you are healthier. I say this because if you were any less healthy than me, you'd almost certainly be dead, and corpses are not known for reading obscure blogs. Well then. As a younger and healthier person, there are one or two things it occurs to me you ought to know about. Firstly and most importantly: the Old Age Truck. I borrow the phrase from Gary Larson, but where he got it I couldn't tell you. The point is, it comes for you quite suddenly: beware . In the original cartoon, you turn a corner and suddenly there are tyre marks across your back and dewlaps u...

I have a son, now eight years old, who was diagnosed at the age of two and a half as Autistic Spectrum (Not Otherwise Specified). He is sitting in front of me as I write, watching a YouTube gameplay video (he is currently into Spore, but occasionally still backslides into Plants Versus Zombies and Cat Simulator). Needless to say, he is almost exactly like me. I have little doubt that if I were shrunk down to eight years old today I would be diagnosed as something . Disturbingly, schools today have psychologists-in-residence, so being diagnosed is an occupational hazard of being a kid, especially for boys . As already described, I escaped all this by growing up in the 60s, and being Catholic. The only diagnosis I recall clearly (apart from that of being made from puppy-dogs' tails, as already mentioned) was Original Sin: i.e., like all Catholic kids, I was routinely diagnosed as evil and thus deserving of eternal torture in a Lake of Fire. That was quite enough to b...