Nice work ...

An erstwhile journalist of my acquaintance, now ensconced in that great gravy train on Thames, once gave me advice about how to prosper in both journalism and politics. ‘Always have your next job lined up and your expense claims up to date,’ he said. I’m sure he’s always conducted himself with the utmost propriety when it comes to MPs’ expenses but I don’t see his name at the bottom end of the league table of low claimers.

I do, however, see the name of one Rt Hon Tony Blair down there as the second-lowest claiming MP in the 2007-08 financial year. He’s sandwiched between the veteran left-winger Dennis Skinner, now in his 40th year as MP for Bolsover, and Philip Hollobone, the Tory representative for Kettering and the cheapest of Westminster’s 646 MPs at Westminster, who claimed barely a third of the £135,600 a year average.

Tony claimed £64,064 expenses for 2007-08, including £5,772 to cover the cost of staying away from his main home (that would be Downing Street, if you remember, so a lot of people would no doubt have been happy to pay for him to stay away a lot longer). Which sounds extremely modest by most MPs standards – until you realise that he quit parliament in June 2007, less than three months into that financial year.

Gays and Muslims

As a headline-grabbing finding, you couldn’t get a much more dramatic – or, from a left-liberal perspective, troubling – statistic than the Gallup poll revelation in May that not one of the 500 British Muslims surveyed thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. Such unanimity is virtually unheard of in opinion polling, where even the whackiest of viewpoints usually finds some sort of minority representation.

It was noteworthy, therefore, that the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) weekly newsletter was recently promoting a piece by gay Muslim film-maker and activist Parvez Sharma on the UN ‘Durban II’ racism conference, where western delegates walked out en masse in protest against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli, Holocaust-doubting views. Sharma clearly got the nod from MPACUK because he chose to direct his criticism against the walkers-out more than against Ahmadinejad, of whom he said only that he ‘made provocative comments which were in poor taste’. But the fact that a campaigning self-proclaimed gay Muslim could feature in such a forum without an outpouring of wrath against him holds out a little hope that perhaps that Gallup poll finding is not as unequivocal as it appears.

Dirty swine flu

Swine flu pandemonium 1976 vintage. Just make sure you boil that bacon thoroughly ...

30 April: Just corrected that spelling because, as a good friend and informant points out, 'pandamonium ... would be a large black and white bear who spends all its time complaining, when in fact they spend all their time eating bamboo and sleeping. Never met such lazy, good for nothing bears as Pandas.' Maybe, but at least they never gave us panda flu ...

Belgium isn't boring

This is dedicated to my sister, whose renditions of Do-Re-Mi, complete with actions, are legendary in the pubs of Stone and well beyond.

Second sex

‘It isn’t only about sex, you know.’ I’ve heard the refrain so often that it’s almost become convincing. And now there’s even a brave new virtual world of political activism and protest being built in online fantasy worlds such as Second Life to justify spending all those hours in front of a computer screen.

Second Life, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a free 3D virtual world where people who have enough time left over from their first life can reinvent themselves and interact with other people via avatars. Once you’ve set up your avatar, you can do all sorts of things that aren’t only about sex – like selling Red Pepper, attending online protest meetings or picketing SL’s digital Israeli embassy, if you’re so inclined, although it has to be said that most of SL’s avatars seem to have other inclinations.

As a hardcore online junkie, old enough to remember rooting around on something called the Undernet and communicating via Internet Relay Chat, and a recovering SimCity and Civilisation addict, I had successfully steered clear of SL since its foundation in 2003. My willpower cracked, though, when a friend insisted that I accompany her on a sort of Motorcycle Diaries-style trip to check out the revolutionary potential.

Let’s say I got distracted.

It started with an invitation to the BadGirlz Club, progressed via a beach resort and continued into a castle occupied by, inter alia, vampires, zombies and aficionados of the cult of Gor (a kind of medieval BDSM fantasy world in which stepping out of character to have a quick laugh at the absurdity of it all gets you kicked out of the club faster than you can say ‘Yes Master’). Before I knew it, my avatar had acquired a shaved head, some very fetching skull tattoos, a single ‘elf gauntlet’ and the tightest pair of gay of gayboi pants you could ever imagine squeezing your bum into. Oh yes, and erm, a box of nine penises.

What do you do with a box of nine penises, I’m sure you’re asking. The answer is: you wear them. Not all at once, of course, and you do have to use a bit of virtual jiggerypokery to unpack them from the box first – as I only discovered after walking around SL with a box labelled ‘Nine Penises’ attached to my avatar’s pelvis for the next couple of days.

My friend, meanwhile, had decided she was up for a sex-change operation. This was after she had refused an offer to spend 155 Linden dollars (SL’s very own currency) on something called ‘seclix rave pacifier’, which supposedly ‘simulates real life pacifier dipped in MDMA’ and is advertised in SL as ‘drugs without the crash’. She spent the money instead on a special, just-like-real-life penis, which came with handy instruction manual.

‘How to adjust the penis size?’ was one of the Q&As, to which the answer is: ‘Wear the penis. Right click it and select “edit”. Click the button “Stretch”. Now use the white blocks to adjust the size. Note that the penis can be made bigger, but not smaller.’

Neither of us has got very far in fomenting a Second Life revolution just yet. But we have a fine collection of penises, if anyone is interested.

Would 'Gotcha!' have been the best tweet ever?

Nice 1 April story about the Guardian going over entirely to Twitter ('OMG Hitler invades Poland' etc). I hear the Sun considered the idea but turned it down: WTF do you do with 140 characters?

England People Very Racist?

I try to avoid reading reviews of things before I have had the chance to make up my own mind. I’m far too contrarian and end up spending far too much time trying to see things differently to the critics.

It was impossible to avoid the charges of cartoon caricatures, racist stereotypes and malevolent wisecracking levelled at Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, currently showing at the National Theatre, however. Commentators ranging from shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove to East End playwright Hussain Ismail were lining up to diss it. Gove called it ‘dramatically appalling ... It made Alf Garnett seem sophisticated.’ Hussein called it ‘racist and offensive ... I went to the first night ... All I could see was a sea of people laughing at immigrants.’ Even theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh, no PC stalwart he, accused it of ‘defaming refugees’ and ‘[fanning] the ever ready flames of prejudice.

So I went prepared to don my contrarian hat but with more than a sniff of disquiet about my person as the audience laughed its way through a sequence of comedy routines dealing with successive waves of immigrants – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews, the occasional Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshis – to Bethnal Green, in London’s East End. Each wave was shown to resent the next; and each ethnic group was the target of the sort of humour that does indeed depend on a high degree of racial and cultural stereotyping.

Was it funny? Most of the audience – and I – certainly thought so. And I don’t think it was only in what Nicholas de Jongh called ‘the slick, cruel, abusive style that Bernard Manning perfected ages ago’. Context is everything, though, and it helps to have some Irish blood coursing through your veins if you find yourself laughing out loud at the Irish’s purported penchant for keeping a pig as part of the family, inter-marrying with your cousins and breeding one-eyed babies as a consequence. ‘Mother always told us not to go with strangers.’ I’m not sure I would have wanted to be laughing at that one if my Irish companion hadn’t been pissing herself already.

I found the treatment of the last great wave of immigrants, Bethnal Green’s Muslim community, more difficult to laugh along with. There seemed to be an undertow that was saying that every other group of refugees has ended up integrating and becoming as indigenous as the English, but that this one was different. The BNP character in the play says to an Afro-Caribbean: ‘It’s not about race any more, it’s about culture.’ The Afro-Caribbean ends up packing his suitcase and heading off ‘home’ to Barbados.

My companion and I argued the toss about the play for at least an hour afterwards. We both agreed that the group to come out worst from it was the white working class, whose primary recurring role throughout this portrayal of 400 years of East End history was that of murderous, racist thugs. That’s an unfair caricature – and it wasn’t very funny.

Dynamite shoes

He breathed in air
He breathed out light
Adrian Mitchell was my delight

Roger McGough introduced Radio 4’s Poetry Please commemoration of Adrian Mitchell with this reworking of Adrian’s own tribute to Charlie Parker, whose ‘Lover Man’ opened the programme. Over the next half hour, some of Adrian’s many friends and fellow poets remembered him and read from his work.

Jackie Kay chose Adrian’s ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ about his childhood experience of bullying. Michael Horovitz took us back to that biggest poetry gig of all time, when Adrian spat out ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ (actually titled ‘To Whom It May Concern’) at the Albert Hall in 1965. Andrew Marr picked up ‘A Puppy Called Puberty’. And John Hegley gave us ‘Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow’ (‘Number One, patriotic: I didn’t lay down my life in World War II so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow; Number Two, snobbish: Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it’).

There was also Jonathan Price (‘Death is smaller than I thought’), Michelle Roberts, Carole Ann Duffy, Brian Patten and John Agard. And most of all there was Adrian’s wife, Celia, reading ‘The Doorbell’, which Adrian had written for CND in 2006. Celia said she had chosen because ‘it is about war and destruction and we met and fell in love because we were both wearing CND badges and we saw each other across the room’:

There, on the doorstep, stood the War.

It filled my front garden,

filled the entire street

and blotted out the sky.

It was human and monstrous,

shapeless, enormous,

with torn and poisoned skin which bled

streams of yellow, red and black ...

The War had many millions of eyes

and all wept tears of molten steel.

Then the War spoke to me

in a voice of bombs and gunfire:
I am your war.
Can I come in?

Roger McGough rounded off with a clip of Adrian and his daughter Sasha singing: ‘Poetry glues your soul together/ Poetry wears dynamite shoes.’ Sasha tells me that she and Celia have agreed to do some of Adrian’s regular gigs this year, including probably the Latitude festival, with Sasha singing and Celia reading his poems. Celia says they’re thinking of a big public commemoration for Adrian, maybe at the Hackney Empire in the autumn.

I’m sure they’ll be unmissable. In the meantime, you can listen to the whole of the Poetry Please commemoration at http://www.topicdrift.com/qt/PoetryPleaseAdrian.mp3

Pictured: Philosophy Football’s t-shirt, with which Adrian was delighted and distributed to various friends and family members, is available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com

Safe skating

'Skater-haters should hobble back home to take their medication and watch Countdown.' Seventy-one-year old Geoff Dornan of Southport, who's just been fined £300 plus £1,800 costs for 'dangerous skating' in Southport's main shopping street, sounds like someone who's spent most of his adult life just waiting for the opportunity to live out Monty Python's Hell's Grannies sketch for real.

You've got to hand it to Geoff, who admits to having had 'heated discussions with [his] fellow geriatrics' about his skating activities and reckons that they're just jealous that he's still up to it in his eighth decade. He's certainly a decent skater, as the CCTV footage shown in court demonstrates. And pretty 'safe' too, as I'm sure the skating community would agree. Eighteen hundred quid for arguing your side of the case is steep by any standards.

Jade Goody: enough said

Somewhere I have copies of the articles I wrote back in 2002 and again during the 'Shillpa Poppadom' affair in 2007 sticking up for Jade Goody. I was going to dig them out and revisit what I'd written about class prejudice and Britain in the light of Jade's diagnosis with terminal cancer but it all felt a bit self-serving and inappropriate when the poor woman is dying, albeit in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Now Michele Hanson has said it for me and I don't have to worry about going over it all again myself. I have a mental image of a bile-filled Sun front page, however, that won't easily be laid to rest. I hope all those who were behind the Goody hatefest will pause for just a moment to reflect on it now.