Dirty Washing

Extraordinary what you can buy on eBay. The recent BBC programme Castaway was 'won' by a bearded person named Jonathan, who (according to the BBC press office, regards himself as 'very intelligent'. Latterly cleaning toilets, his previous jobs have included fortune-telling, tarot card reading and digging sewers. He is quoted as saying that 'humans make me sad'.

Claiming that he is not 'some bland wannabe', but a cult TV hero who is going to become 'more famous, popular, loved, revered etc.', Jonathan has put the disgusting clothes he wore on the programme up for auction on eBay, under the appropriate heading 'Jonathan's Disgusting Clothes'. They include shorts, swimming trunks, trousers, t-shirts and other soiled items.

The starting price is £0.01, the 'buy-it-now' price, £999.99. Scarily, he offers to deliver the items in person, albeit at a cost of 35p per mile.

There have been no bids yet. Humans may make Jonathan sad, but apparently they are not all as sad as Jonathan.

Fathers' Day

Overheard at a Fathers' Day dinner last night:

"I don't want to sit next to Daddy. He's boring"

Ruthless Rhymes

There is too much good 'motorcyle action' on TV today to concentrate on blogging. And we are dining away for Father-in-Law's Day. But in view of yesterday's focus on literati, here are some ruthless rhymes wot I rote.

Wet Sophie

Sophie's such a silly creature
She fell into the water feature.
She did it, ne'er a doubt,
Trying to pick some pebbles out.
Slipping down each waterfall
She didn't do much harm at all,
But when she plopped into the sump
She went and blocked the wretched pump.
It caused her mother great distress -
She'd only lately bought that dress.

Dustbin Man

When Spotty raced down Coldblow Lane
Astride his Harley, in the rain.
I bet, just briefly, he was sorry
To meet the ascending dustbin lorry.
The impact made a dreadful sound
But, praise be, Spotty's still around;
They wear him as a mascot still,
Embedded in the engine grille


Fragrant Pru

Auntie Pru, with her great, hooked schnoz
Is like a witch - or at least, she was;
She caught it in the oven door
And doesn't have a nose no more.
It fell inside (she should have looked)
And came out awfully overcooked.
Alas, poor Auntie Pru's not well;
The good news is, she doesn't smell.

The Last Bus

Greedy Stephen (the daft berk),
While waiting for his bus to work,
Spotted something on the ground.
It was a 10p piece he'd found!
Believing it his lucky day
He bent across the carriageway
And thus poor Stephen met his fate;
The bus was prompt, and made him late.

DIY

Trying to fix a faulty socket
Father burnt up like a rocket.
He did not do us any favours -
The TV would not work for 'Neighbours'.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frank McEachran, WH Auden, Alan Bennett, Stephen Glover ... and me.

When I wrote 'so much grass' yesterday, I was referring to the kind you mow, not the kind you do, although the latter would equally have impeded my blog. Unlike Coleridge, I never wrote better under the influence of anything (except, possibly, unrequited love - creativity, as Freud intuited, sometimes being an expression of sublimated sex). The few surviving fragments of stuff written when stoned, in the days when I wrote when stoned, prove that for me grass was almost entirely consciousness razing.

I'm not sure that Coleridge's Kubla Khan would have benefited from being completed. Its fragmentary nature adds to its perfection, like a sherd from a stained-glass window, or an artist who dies young.

The lines from Kubla Khan, 'Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise', gave rise to the practice of a master at my school of encouraging boys to stand on a chair, around which three chalk lines had been drawn, and recite fragments of poetry. The master was Frank McEachran - 'Kek' - and he called the recitations, 'Spells'. Kek, who had taught and inspired the poet WH Auden and fought in the Spanish Civil War, was the model for Hector in Alan Bennett's recent play, 'The History Boys', although I gather Bennett never met him.

While I remember him well, I was only taught by Kek on a handful of occasions, being too talentless to be in the top english sets - sitting instead in the second division alongside the (now) newspaper columnist and former editor of the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Glover. As well as having more pocket money, Stevie was cleverer and more erudite than me, although, being more angst-ridden, I wrote better poetry.

I do at least still have a signed copy of one of Kek's books, 'Freedom the Only End'. On the flysheet he has written, 'Private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places', which I only now realise is a quote from his protégé Auden.

Biting the Lager Queue

So much grass, so little time. It's why I haven't been blogging much. I wonder if my reader noticed? And when it's not the garden, it's something else. A neighbour wants me to construct the missing mechanism from a metamorphic sofa she is restoring. I went to see it yesterday. It was in a barn full of hens, and smelt like hen-poo. She said she would jet spray it before I started, but that it was a good, antique piece underneath. Memo: remember to jet-spray the antiques when I get home.

I'm reading Barbara Trapido at the moment, enjoying her love of linguistic quirks. I like these too. Song titles and lyrics are particularly ripe for misinterpretation. I think it was Denis Norden who referred to Malashkin's 'Oh, Could I but Express in Song' as the 'Buttocks Pressing Song'. Barbara T has her characters sing a round which goes, 'Life is butter, melon, cauliflower'. Work it out.

The other evening at dinner someone asked Megan what she'd like, and she replied, 'Shloer please', which sounded so like a viral infection that, after a moment's pause, everyone cracked up. I have a connected, and no doubt tiresome, habit of spoonerising phrases - transposing the initial letters. Sometimes the results work better than others, as on Saturday, when muttering that I was going to bite the lager queue.

This sort of reminds me of a laconic conversation I once had walking to school with Robin Waterfield (now an author and academic living in Greece), which may qualify as amongst the shortest on record. It was doing that halfway house between mist and mizzle. I said, 'S'wet'. Robin replied, 'S'not'.

McJobs

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a McJob as 'an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector'.

In April 2006 McDonald's UK Press Office issued a press release announcing 'a bold, disruptive new campaign' to 'redefine the phrase 'McJob'. The campaign featured the slogan, 'Not bad for a McJob'. David Fairhurst, Vice President, People, McDonald's, was quoted as saying: "The existing definition of McJob is outdated.. ...this campaign tackles the McJob perception head on." If you visit McDonald's UK corporate web site you'll find the same McJob slogan, amongst the references to McProspects, McCompany Car, McPackage, McDiscounts, McValued, etc.

One might conclude.....(leaving aside that McDonald's press office is so illiterate that it doesn't know the difference between a word and a phrase; ignoring the association of a fine Scottish clan with a sinister clown and diarrhoeaic abuse of the gaelic 'Mc' prefix; briefly upchucking at the concept of a 'Vice President, People').....one might conclude that McDonald's had itself helped to promote the term 'McJob'.

However, having failed to change public perceptions, this week McDonald's has re-launched the attempt to have the definition of the word 'McJob' in the Oxford English Dictionary expunged or replaced. There is to be a public petition (puhlease!), and the company has enlisted various 'names' to support its manipulative campaign. These reportedly include former CBI supremo Sir Digby Jones, David Frost (not the David Frost, a David Frost), and several MPs.

Labour MP Clive Betts has sponsored an Early Day Motion deploring the use of derogatory terms for service sector jobs (yes, the same Mr Betts who was suspended from the House of Commons by the Committee on Standards and Privileges, which observed that his conduct had fallen 'well below the standard expected of a Member, in terms of maintaining and strengthening the public's trust and confidence in the integrity of Parliament and never undertaking any action which would bring the House of Commons, or its Members generally, into disrepute').

This time round McDonald's is saying that, 'It's time the dictionary definition of McJob was changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime'. Yeah. Stimulating. Skills. Right.

I cannot say whether McDonald's are right in disagreeing with the OED definition. The only friend I have who worked there was Bob. He spoke well of the McDonald's career structure, having progressed to supervisor in about five minutes. However, he retired from the company after a few months and opened a pottery in Souillac in southern France. I'm not sure whether the skills he gained behind the counter contributed greatly in later life. His pots don't resemble Happy Meals, but I suppose preparation and moulding of clay may have something in common with McDonald's meat processing.

However, accuracy isn't the point. Dictionaries should reflect usage, not corporate, service sector or governmental aspirations. Attempts by McDonald's and its toadies to control the meaning of our language should be viewed with disdain and maybe sound alarm bells. Given that McDonald's failed to have a similarly unfavourable entry removed from the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2003, perhaps it simply sees the campaign as an opportunity for some cheap, high profile recruitment and brand promotion. However, the MPs should know better. Think of Newspeak in Orwell's 1984:

'The...vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words...intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them'

They should watch out. It may not be long before the OED acknowledges public perception and changes its definition of a politician from 'one skilled in politics, statesman', to 'one practised in misleading the people, untrustworthy, manipulative, grasping.'

Loving Your Fellow Man

We've just been to Lidls. I'm not sure what was going on, but it feels as if we've just escaped from an interplanetary convention on Omega Four. There was a man in a suit shop-shadowing us as he blethered loudly into a mobile about breach of contract, and everyone seemed to have brought their entire families, with several generations blocking each aisle arguing about which brand of burger was best and whether to buy stick-on safety corners for their furniture.

But the star turn was a family of chavs. There seemed to be about 19 of them, although it may have been as few as six. There was a squat mother in a tracksuit, children from the mid teens down (none of them resembling each other) and a screaming infant. They looked misshapen, smelt appalling and shouted at each other at the tops of their voices, launching a multi-pronged attack on one's sensory system. In fact they were so environmentally unfriendly they should have required planning permission. They were also very hard to escape, doubling back on their tracks with sudden forays into cheese and yoghourt from nuts and crisps, or dividing to surge down two lanes at once. At one point we got caught in an unexpected pincer movement between frozen foods and toiletries. It was no accident that at the end one of only two available check-outs was occupied by them, and the other by a queue stretching halfway down the shop.

The children should have been at school anyway, but I suppose that would have been a waste of time.