The Incredible Wordsmith

Saturday, 20 th June 2020 This blog post is a meditation on water and amphibians and The Wind in the Willows. It may or may not make any sense. I Is it just me, or does Boris Johnson increasingly resemble the character of Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows . To confirm my prejudices in this regard (because I only like to have them confirmed – usually by myself – and not dismantled), I found the 1984 stop-motion animation series on YouTube, produced for Thames TV, and randomly chose an episode to watch. This was television from a gentler time, without the garishness and noise and hectic cutting of current children’s television. By chance, Episode 4 was called ‘The Compleat Bungler’ and it began, as all the episodes began, with Mr Toad reading or writing his memoirs: ‘Another week crammed with events, which yet again has demonstrated the wit, courage and nobility of we Toads. Sad to say, then, that the family has not always appreciated it, as it should be.’ All weeks are c...

Saturday, June 13 th 2020 Just to be clear, in case you stumble upon this blog, what I have written below is satire. I am not a member or sympathiser of EDL or any far-right group. I am an armchair anarchist and this is my contribution to showing these people for what they are: ignorant, violent, and afraid. *   Diary of an Anti-Antifa protester Fucking grand day out that was! Makes you proud to be British when you see your mates standing in Trafalgar Square with a Union Jack wrapped round their shoulders, a bottle of beer in one hand and Sieg-heiling the shitting-themselves-all-day-long antifa snowflakes. After Tommy Robinson’s shout out for London action, we started mobilising on Facebook. I wanted to make a sign but couldn’t decide what to put on it. I got the crayons out and made one said, ‘White Pride’ but the missus said it sounded fucking gay so I went with ‘Mad in England.’ The wife said, did I mean ‘made’ but I couldn’t squeeze in the ‘e’ so left it as it was (she’s a...

Sunday, 7 th June 2020 Do you remember when you were halfway through writing a novel about some made-up people in a made-up place doing made-up things, written for an imaginary readership of people who existed in a time somewhere in the future? And then the whole world was shifted on its axis and writing about imaginary people doing imaginary things was somehow dwarfed by the very real but invisible monster pounding across the land. So here I am, stuck between the past, where I had plans and dreams, and the future, where no plans can be made and dreams wither on the vine. I imagine this is the same for lots of people. What is there to mark the days without the celebrations, large and small, that dot the calendar? What is there to look forward to? How do we distinguish the days, one from another, when time is not pockmarked with events, moments that we refer back to in our memories, special times? As an old git, my calendar was pretty empty. We had booked no holiday because we kn...