The Daily Scorch

The Return of Countess Geschwitz

2011-08-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

I would apologise for my long absence if I were a different person. Instead suffice to say that, by goading ex-President Yushchenko into testifying against former Prime Minister Tymoshenko at the latter's show trial in Kiev, I have almost completed the task of turning Ukrainian politics into an Expressionist performance of the missing portion of Gogol's "Dead Souls".

I returned to Britain with our daughter Arianrhod this week to see how Boyo and young Bendigeidfran have been coping. My house is, of course, ruined. Which is why I sold it quietly to a Montenegrin gentleman prior to my departure last year. Boyo has, however, been quite busy.

After unglueing the laptop - never was a computer more aptly named - I casually accessed Boyo's files (password "ImmerAngela") - and found two screenplays.

As for the first - "Alien vs Predator vs Dalek" - I think the executive summary says it all: "The Aliens and Predators take out the Daleks, dress in their Dalek suits and duke it out for an hour like mad-bastard dodgems before an atomic bomb or something. NB to self - Sarah Hadland, catsuit."

The second is altogether more ambitious. "The Lion Tamer" posits a Britain in which "some liberals" have freed all the circus animals "elephants, horses, clowns, sea-lions, real lions natch" into the wild because of a campaign by Blue Peter.

It also means that various animal wranglers are now out of work and thirsting for revenge on bien-pensant Britain. The police fight pitched battles with ringmasters, Cossack cavalry and large-footed buffoons on tiny bicycles, amid scenes of seals rampaging through fishmongers, but one man stands alone above the fray - the Lion Tamer.

This alloy of Conan and Camus is clearly modelled on Boyo himself, if Boyo were a slab of marbled beefcake who lets his single-tail do the talking. He wanders the land, righting wrongs by applying his beast-baiting skills to the underclass and irrigating shireswomen with his brackish seed.

It gradually clots into the sort of pepper-spray overdose of sixth-form symbolism and cartwheeling limbs that passes for plot in male dystopias, although this one has a happy ending in which the hero saves our Home Secretary, Theresa May, from being mauled by a lion through, er, taming it.

He then rides the Home Secretary sideways, on the swiftly-flayed hide of the lion.

Cue credits over the fortunate Privy Councillor's flushed yet ashen features as a voice-over explains that Mrs May becomes prime minister, exiles the wild animals to Scotland, and appoints the Lion Tamer head of a "special forces force" made up of battle-hardened circus performers.

Who will no doubt feature in "Lion Tamer II: Mark of the Beast". There was little to show in the file thus headed, except the phrase "Louise Mensch, cyber MP".

Boyo's other major achievement was to teach Bendigeidfran to shout at the television.

"Воспитание происходит всегда, даже тогда, когда вас нет дома."

Le bon Dieu est dans le détail

2010-11-12T04:41:00.001-08:00

An explanation: I've spent the last few months helping the new Yanukovych Administration ruin Ukraine as a special advisor working on the Plekhanovite principle of The Worse, The Better ("чем хуже, тем лучше").

Having reached the "Worse" stage ahead of schedule, I was happy to retire to the other end of Europe and confidently let the Dialectic lead the happy Cossack collective onwards towards the "Better".

My return was not unclouded, as any wife can imagine. Boyo told me that he had taken up the ways of Gandhi in my absence, and I was naturally disappointed to discover he meant Mahatma not Indira.

Still, I reasoned, he would be saving me a fortune on vodka and laundry bills, and might even have managed to spin a half-decent pashmina for my collection.

Instead, I found Boyo doubled up in a corner of the kitchen, his jowls green and his palms furred. By his side lay a crumpled and curiously-modified photograph of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel.

I picked up a chipped piece of china, and quickly tried to drop it again.

"Oh Boyo," I sighed, "It was a cup of his own water that Gandhi drank every day!"

Green et idéal

2010-06-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

Boyo is a lurching emporium of Welsh culture in all its gassy degeneracy. His conversation is a stream of Welshisms - the turgid verbal redundancy, pli selon pli, that I summarised earlier as "clanging tautology".

Boyo is also a delightful source of Mondegreen, such as his subconscious upgrading of the loathsome "Mull of Kintyre" into "Bollocking Time".

A recent conversation of his with another Welsh-speaker yielded a serendipitous conjunction of the two phenomena. They were discussing the lyrics of Welsh Wales's sole contribution to the punk genre, namely "Rhedeg i Paris" ("Running to Paris") by the group Anhrefn.

Boyo cited this song as evidence of the sheer literacy of Welsh popular music, in particular the line "wedi achub Boudu o foddi dan dwr" - "having saved Boudu from drowing".

I was impressed. Few punk singers refer to Renoir's "Boudu sauvé des eaux". Until his compatriot, in a treasonable display of accuracy and honesty, pointed out that the line is "cofio am bentrefi wedi boddi dan dwr" - "remembering drowned villages" - a constant lament of Welsh poetry ever since the English discovered that water is useful for washing and turned various Snowdonian valleys into reservoirs in the mid-1960s.

An amusing mishearing, and an apt puncturing of Boyo's bathetic bumptiousness, but there was better to come. I asked why "remembering drowned villages" takes so long to say in Welsh. The literal translation, it emerges, is "remembering villages that have been drowned under water".

Not just drowned, but drowned "under water". I don't like to imagine what else the Welsh are liable to drown in, but suspect that one day I'll find out.

De Bella et Gallo

2010-04-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Boyo has rediscovered his enthusiasm for Dr Who, a curious British televisual confection that seeks to graft 1950s science-fiction plots onto pantomime with the uncertain archness that passes for humour in much of BBC output.

Ever eager to find just causes in law, I watched the last episode to ascertain the source of this uncharacteristic spousal animation.

Was it the latest "companion"? Hardly. Ms Karen Gillan is an improvement on the previous auburn slattern to grace the Doctor's arm, but neither comes close to Boyo's type. Like the gentleman in this poignant documentary film, my partner still keens for Billie Piper with mournful and never-ending remembrance:

Was it the switch in writers from Russell T Davies to Steven Moffat? Boyo admires the latter's masterpiece, Coupling, and its sympathetic portrayal of a priapic Welsh simpleton in particular. He is, however, unlikely to applaud the ouster of compatriot Davies for a Scotch such as Moffat.

Was it the latest actor to play the heroic physician? Matt Smith rates an irritation factor of four, as opposed to the eight scored by his predecessor David Tennant, and dresses much like Boyo himself. But that cannot be enough, otherwise my prime subject would be glued to "Last of the Summer Wine".

Then I heard it. At 27'52" in the iPlayer version of "Victory of the Daleks", came this:

"This is the end for you. The final end."

The declamatory style. The repetition. And, of course, the clanging tautology - all the signs of the Welshism, as discussed earlier on this site.

Spring is in the air, but all I can taste is slate on the breeze.

From the Sleep of Reason

2010-03-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Boyo works from home on Fridays in an effort to educate our son Bendigeidfran in his preferred version of the Welsh language, one even meaner of vowel than most.

I ensure that the popular application of "working from home" is not available to Boyo by engaging the parental controls on his laptop and hiding the Calpol.

Boyo instead surpasses himself in both irrelevance and depravity by teaching young 'Fran his bolt-on tongue by simultaneously translating Universal horror films. You've not really experienced the full poignancy of Inspector Krogh's childhood encounter with The Monster in "Son of Frankenstein" until you've heard it in Welsh, apparently.

The inadequate English original is here at 07:06, if you care to compare:

Watching these films anew led me to a useful insight. The appeal of the Universal monsters to infants and adult males alike stems from their childishness. For they are babies:

Dracula sleeps all day and suckles all night.
The Frankenstein Monster raises its arms piteously to the unfamiliar light and stumbles about in ill-fitting clothes. This would in addition explain its appeal to the Welsh.
The Wolfman is permanently teething.

We now see in context the popularity among grown men of the Predator film and its successors, as eloquently set out by The Daily Mash here on the basis of my initial thesis.

The Predator is what every young man aspires to be. His life is one long paint-balling weekend, with the added stimuli of invisibility (permitting the observation of female xenomorphs in the shower), rolling in mud with human skulls, and the binding of all loose ends by an atom bomb.

But now we're onto the secondary-school curriculum.

Actiones sunt suppositorum

2009-12-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

In this festive season, it seems appropriate to ask what is mortification.

Some see it as a shriving of the body that frees the soul.

Others believe it is a natural consequence of approaching godliness.

These people know nothing. Mortification is standing at your door before a gathering of carol singers. They have just asked your pre-school daughter what Yuletide tune she would like to hear, and received the lisping response "Jesus Entering From the Rear".

Theodicy cannot encompass your feelings when she then launches into the chorus.

“He was laughing in the tower”

2009-10-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

I grow weary of Boyo's diaries. The constantly doubled consonants in Anna Chancellor's name tire my eyes.

Instead I've taken to his record collection. Long abandoned by their owner, these discs of trembling ebony sing beneath my fingernails.

I have concluded that the finale of Sir Malcolm Arnold's 5th Symphony is a sour commentary on Wozzeck - Berg not Büchner.

Listen, and tell me what you think.

Am I Alone in Thinking?

2009-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

Probably.

Che farò senza Euridice?

2009-07-05T03:49:00.000-07:00

A bedtime story exchange:

No Good Boyo: So Dorothy and her little dog ran back to the farmhouse to escape from the tornado. And what was Dorothy's little dog called?

Arianrhod, our daughter: Cerberus.

Au fond de l'Inconnu

2009-06-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo subscribes to what he claimed is a journal of Attic Greek research called Radiotimes, but turns out to be a tele-vision and wireless listings magazine.

I leafed through it the other day in apprehension of finding out what British people watch other than the ritual humiliation of rural simpletons - a form of entertainment that Ukrainians prefer to enjoy live.

I found this:

Hay-on-Sky

7.00pm Sky Arts ARTS

Bill Clinton dubbed it "the Woodstock of the mind", and the annual literary festival in the small town of Hay-on-Wye attracts a much wider field that just London literati.

The likes of Sandi Toksvig, Simon Schama, Sophie Dahl, Rick Wakeman, Heston Blumenthal, Marcus Brigstock and Sting will all be there this year.

Many of them will make it along to Sky Arts's temporary studio for a chat with Mariella Frostrup and she'll also have daily reports on events through to the end of May.

Sting is revered as a demiurge by the mountainfolk of Tyahnybok District in the High Carpathians because of his physical and vocal resemblence to Yeldasys, an hermaphrodite wood sprite, but these others are unfamiliar to me.

I feel a little ashamed to have underestimated the intellectual balast that weighs down the barque of British public life, and shall apply myself during this confinement to studying the works of Brigstock, Wakeman et alia.

Any recommendations for a point of departure into this sea of knowledge would be welcome.

Getrennt-vereint

2009-05-08T02:16:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I was intrigued to find myself pregnant again. A little later I was disappointed to find that No Good Boyo was the father.

My confinement has given me real insights into my spouse's daily life. For example, he has personalised settings on his computer that filter every Internet search into its nearest pornographic equivalent.

I now regret trying to augment my Hitchcock collection by Googling "remastered Rear Window".

I gave him money, name tags and a map of London before he set off for the British Museum's "Babylon" exhibition with our daughter Arianrhod. On his return I frisked his duffel bag to discover a Bob Marley t-shirt and a bottle of rhum.

He has a commendable approach to ecology, as indescribable items of his clothing also serve as dish-cloths, elementary footwear and devices used in the making of cheese as the years pass.

Paternity has not sapped his creative urge. I found a letter in my name addressed to the "Mrs Mills" column in The Sunday Times, asking for advice on "unsightly facial removal". No words had been omitted.

Finally, Arianrhod recently assured me that her ambition on leaving school is to become a "mod wolf". And I thought I had cleansed the house of Hesse.

Es Gibt Keine Alternative

2009-02-18T08:38:00.000-08:00

A belated Valentine from Boyo, ready for my 2010 election campaign.

Un cœur simple

2009-01-22T16:50:00.000-08:00

It is easy and rewarding to jeer at No Good Boyo, especially now that bear-rolling has been outlawed in Ukraine, but he does have some noble qualities.

One is his conviction of that everything he has ever done is a pleasure to behold, and an honour if he did it to you.

Earlier this week I finally managed to translate his college diary, with the help of the Welsh Academy's daunting dictionary and by asking Boyo what it all meant during his evening appreciation of Voskoboynykiv's latest vat of monkey juice.

I read that two of his college conquests subsequently "became" lesbians and joined convents. Now Boyo's tastes in the érotique are catholic rather than Catholic, and he has little time for the "nuns with guns" sub-genre, so we can assume that all he wrote was true.

I asked him how it felt to know that one boudoir encounter with him was enough to make two young women realise not only that they are homosexual but also that a life of prayerful chastity is the only way to regain their self-worth.

Boyo was watching John Carpenter's The Fog, a film that he maintains is a witty deconstruction of Conquista myths. But then he also thinks leprosy is caused by "too much rabbits". He paused in his viewing, focused on my shoulder and delivered himself of the opinion that:

"One night with me and they both knew no ordinary man would ever be enough. So they dyked up and went to try out some nuns. Makes sense, innit?"

I said nothing. Perhaps he felt he had been a little crass, as he added:

"It was separate nights, not both of them together. Though that would have explained where they got the idea from, mind."

A slot on Radio 4's Thought For The Day beckons.

The force that through the green fuse...

2008-12-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

An excited but mercifully clothed No Good Boyo waved The Sunday Times at me in the afternoon.

He'd got round to reading a review of ageing actress Carrie Fisher's new book "Wishful Drinking" - a title designed not only to catch but firmly restrain his attention.

Boyo has admired Ms Fisher's work since being loaned a video tape of "The Return of the Jedi", a children's adventure film in which she sports a brass bikini and chain. As I recall he fast-forwarded to the relevant scene, watched it three times, then wrote Ms Fisher the letter that still has him debarred from entering the United States under his real name.

"Carrie done a course on electroconvulsive therapy, so I'll do the same!" he declared. "It's time I studied a science. I'll see you when I finished. Ciao for now!"

And off he went. As the daughter of an officially-sanctioned mad scientist I could only applaud his enthusiasm.

Intrigued, I flicked through the review of Ms Fisher's book. "Ah, a course of electroconvulsive therapy," I noted, reminding myself to check the back-up generator before retiring for a peaceful night.

One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

2008-12-13T07:23:00.000-08:00

To mark the anniversary of the dispersal of the Russian Constituent Assembly by weary but armed proletarians in 1918, No Good Boyo and I like to exchange gifts as a sign of our reciprocal respect for me.

Each year we take turns in presenting a gift to our daughter Arianrhod. Two years ago I left Boyo to his own devices, and have rued doing so with every blast on the little mite's specially-adapted Alpenhorn.

This year I suggested the distance-adoption of an animal. This would sidestep looming demands for a neglected pet of our own, and go a little way to overcome my regret at not applying for that job running donkey sanctuaries in one of the more inbred parts of England.

Imagine my delight when Boyo announced that he had adopted a Bengal tiger on Arianrhod's behalf, via the admirably unsentimental World Wildlife Fund.

With much less effort one can also imagine my reaction when Boyo wrote to the Fund asking whether for an extra "tenner" Arianrhod would have "first crack" at the said tiger when she reached "blooding age".

"A rug! A rug!" squealed my daughter on receipt of a photographic print of the beast.

The Sun may have set on the British Empire, but the occasional shadow still flits across my conservatory.

The Long March

2008-11-26T02:04:00.000-08:00

The anarcho-syndicalist meeting had failed to convene, as usual, so I was home a little early last night.

"Yoo-hoo Boyo, it's me!" I cooed.

"Begone woman, I am at stool!" barked my beau.

I knew better than to interrupt what might be a prolonged and gruesome process, as this would only make things worse.

As I released the traps and tenderised Arianrhod's dinner, I dwelt upon the dialectical significance of what sounded like a brass band being savaged by seagulls in our bathroom.

Boyo has introduced his readers to the concept of the gosha. He failed, through the inherent contradictions of his being a man, to explain to womankind how the gosha is to be handled.

Common sense would suggest industrial gauntlets and fishing nets, but it is more a question of time than space.

Once an idea has taken root in the alkaline mulch of a gosha's mind, a woman must have the strength and patience to let it go to seed at its own pace. To try to train it into a more pleasing shape or, worse, to prune or uproot it, would drive the bravest Amazon into the apathetic rot of liberalism.

Boyo has shown little Marxisant enthusiasm for the impending downfall of Capitalism, and is busy with plans to make money. After a few canteens of Voskoboynykiv's jus de singe, he likes to "run his thoughts past me" in the hope that some might escape. I give some examples.

1. Alien-themed restaurant. Attentive readers will know that Boyo thinks all wisdom can be gleaned from repeated and drunken viewing of the films Animal House and Withnail & I. It is not so widely understood that he treats the Alien film franchise as a sort of apocrypha - not as canonical as the thoughts of imaginary frat boys and fey thespians, but nonetheless endowed with arete.

His latest idea is to deck out a restaurant like an Alien tabernacle (yes, including the minor prophets of the Alien vs Predator series), and have diners encased inside the food. They then have to eat their way out - either by climbing out of the top in the manner of the Alien "face hugger" or by burrowing out of the side like the "chest burster".

I could mention hygiene regulations. I could allude to the cost of the mountains of meat involved. I could refer to dry cleaning, as if those words meant anything to him. But I do not.

2. "Eat Like An Animal". Do you see a theme here? This brainwave predicates a television quiz show involving Lady Antonia Fraser as a contestant for reasons I don't like to speculate about.

Each victim is given a plate of food and an animal. They then have to eat the dish in the manner of the beast alongside them. The creature then "shows" them how it should be done, to the delight and edification of the audience in the studio and at home.

"This will teach the people of Britain humility before the diversity and dexterity of the Animal Kingdom," slurred Boyo over his plate of offal. "Imagine Lady Antonia or that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown trying to eat a trifle like an amœba? I can!"

I smiled brightly. I could have drawn his attention to the Food Standards Agency, the RSPCA, Harold Pinter, Heaven of Heavens and other likely opponents of his plan, but chose not to.

Boyo has other schemes, many more gauche and alarming than these. I shall pass over them in silence, knowing as I do that male indolence, grandiloquence and life-saving stupidity will overcome random enthusiasm.

Allow me to employ the techniques of multimedia to illustrate my point. I consider the Channel 4 comedy Father Ted to be a protean guide to understanding the male psyche, if such were ever to exist.

In an early episode, Father Jack Hackett is seen cavorting in some undergrowth. A policeman offers to shot him with a tranquiliser dart. Father Ted stays the Guard's hand. "No, let him go," says the clerical reactionary, "he'll make his own way back."

My thoughts exactly.

You may study the exchange at 58" on this clip:

Ansichtskartenspiel

2008-11-16T02:17:00.000-08:00

No Good Boyo escorted myself and Arianrhod to our local commemoration of an English backyard auto-de-fé last night, at which pink-faced plumbers ate pork products as their children danced around a bonfire. It looked like any given Saturday night in the High Carpathians to me.

Boyo was intrigued to see that our neighbour's wife had broken her leg. "Does that mean you're housebound and unable to run fast?" he asked politely.

We returned home shortly afterwards for a variety of closely-linked reasons.

Boyo sought to comfort me with an offer to have the choice moments of my web blog published in book form. "The postcard format is making a comeback," he explained.

I laughed until he'd stopped crying.

November Theses

2008-11-02T01:09:00.000-07:00

Constant reader Gyppo Byard has asked me to list six random things about myself. I regret to say that he did not ask me exclusively, but rather mentioned me in a list of his fellow cyberdrones. I will nonetheless give a response:

1. The most random thing in my life is No Good Boyo. Partner, chauffeur, unwitting food-taster and guerrilla gardener, he seems to leach logic and consequence out of everyday events.

2. I am a follower of the dialectic, but cannot match it in relentlessness. Sometimes I like to relax at our family's ruined laboratory in the Carpathians with a pile of Will Self novels on a nice warm pyre.

3. Boyo is my married name. My maiden name is one of the most widely-defaced on the cartouches of 18th Dynasty tombs

4. My father says I was conceived ("if that's the word") one heady night in celebration of the Soviet correction of the "Prague Spring" rightist deviation in both Czecho and Slovakia - a full year before that fraternal intervention occurred.

5. A border guard dog was named after me on the Uzh section of the frontier.

The circumstances that led up to this honour were the subject of my primary school essay "How Many Objective Banderites I Found Hiding in Bushes in the Closed Border Zone During My Summer Holidays With Comrade Uncle Colonel Jajcabiy", which won the Menzhinsky Prize for the under-sevens.

6. During work-experience with the People's Militia information dispersal department, I suggested expelling Esperantists from the state youth movement.

The reason I gave was that our tolerance of Esperanto was making the Socialist Bloc look like a haven for the mentally underequipped rather than a Vanguard of Progress. In fact I was rather taken with Volapük at the time - the original Schleyer version, not the infantile De Jong revision. I admired its purity.

If the organs had taken my advice, the Warsaw Pact might still be intact.

The rules suggest that I should to pass on these "meme" to six others. I shall do nothing of the kind. Instead I ask that my readers should try to think of six non-random elements to their daily lives. And meditate thereon.

The Sixth Art

2008-10-28T03:10:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo has decided to beat the recession by diversifying his multimedia portfolio. He is writing a "sure fire" screenplay for a Hollywood film.

On Friday, after an extended lunchtime, he came up with the title - "Escape from Bikini Island".

Over the weekend he fretted that this did not meet his usual standards.

Last night he announced in triumph the new, improved title:

"No Escape from Bikini Island".

I pass this on without comment.

Recessional

2008-10-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

Signs of recession in Berkshire.

1. Our local supermarket is once again stocking its "own brand" Irish whiskey.

2. No Good Boyo is once again buying it.

Gulbenkian

2008-10-05T01:19:00.000-07:00

Some readers have confused me with Boyo's imaginary social secretary, and have passed on congratulations for his appearance on the normblog profile and his winning of some special needs Welsh blogging award.

"Does Boyo feel proud to have joined the blogging aristocracy?" petitioners have asked.

This autumn finds me uncharacteristically expansive as I cherish the falling leaves and house prices, so I am willing to reply to these broad inquiries.

Boyo's sole source of pride, judging by his all-too-public declarations, is that he is "hung like a Grand National winner".

Whatever one of those is.

Malocchi

2008-09-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

My company respects the many varieties of Ruthenian public holiday, and the recent four-day Feast of St Trjaxodjev gave me a chance to catch up with the recordings made by my domestic closed-circuit television security system.

The recording of our daughter Arianrhod's room solved the mystery of the whereabout of my father's Luger, and the two cameras mounted in the potting shed provided me with more information that sanity allows about No Good Boyo's morning ablutions - information that I am happy to share.

On surfacing from the remoulade of breasts and megalomania that is his subconscious, Boyo's first act is to grasp the shifting contents of his underpants - assuming gravity, decay or rodents had not already disposed of such garments.

I postponed discussion of this matter until a few moments before Boyo was about to address the Caversham Conservative Association. He seemed genuinely surprised and confused, until I recalled that this is his default reaction to anything I say.

"It's primæval behaviour," I remarked.

"Ta, love!" he beamed, proudly wresting the microphone from my hand.

This need for reassurance that one's lower depths are intact is clearly a male instinct - like lying, inept concealment, blondes and recourse to drink.

Cardinals fearful of Pio Nono's Evil Eye would shield their privates in his Papal presence, while cricketers and "rap" genre singers like Mr 50 Cent continue the practice to this day, albeit with less reticence.

During the "questions from the floor" session after his address to the local Tories, Boyo eventually agreed with my insistent inquiries as to whether he called those pallid parts his "crown jewels".

The mood of the meeting was with me when I urged him for the sake of the Monarchy to reclassify them as "state secrets".

Cinema of Cruelty I

2008-09-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

One of Boyo's imaginary cybershades, I forget which, asked me to compile a list of twelve films of personal significance to me. There are, naturally, no such films.

I am happy, however, to share a few flickering images of cultural decay that have caused the corners of my vermillion lips or eyes to twitch on rare occasions.

1. Cold Comfort Farm

Boyo waits until I'm at peace with the world, usually after a successful morning of supervising the evacuation of one of his sheds, before suggesting that we should visit his relatives in Wales.

I keep a copy of John Schlesinger's film at hand to remind myself of why Offa's Dyke was built and is still maintained. The book may not be set in Wales, but that wrinkled little country keeps its spirit alive (see photograph above).

2. L'année dernière à Marienbad

"Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles".

I passed the "French nonsense" section of my International Baccalaureate with an essay positing that the Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film is a meditation on Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental".

In fact I like it because it reminds me of my childhood family holidays.

3. Gorod Zero (Zero Town)

Mechanical tyrants, random nudity, roads that lead nowhere, both rock and roll, pools of water, suicidal cooking - this late Soviet offering is a reminder of what that Bolshevik shambles was like. It is also an approximation of Boyo's idea of a decent party.

4. El ángel exterminador

In this film Buñuel approximates my idea of a decent party.

I shall suggest a few more accompaniments to a cosy night in when it occurs to me.

Very heavy, Switzerland

2008-08-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

Boyo has annoyed some very powerful people, so Arianrhod and I are enjoying a girly Bank Holiday at home - filing nails, attaching them to the wheels of the tricycle, etc.

I glanced through the Radio Times - a publication Boyo says he subscribes to for the Radio 3 listings, much as Americans read Playboy for the John Updike interviews.

I found a preview of "Mutual Friends" another BBC "comedy drama" about the mid-life crisis of mid-Brit people - boney, grinning men and flat-faced blondes.

"How do you embrace your mid-life crisis?" asks the chirpy accompanying article.

"Reluctantly, and only after he's showered," I thought.

Then I laughed.

An Occurrence At Malmesbury Bridge

2008-08-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo was very excited when I proposed a romantic weekend break in the Cotswolds. His enthusiasm wavered on the morning of departure when I said I was coming along too, but he still managed to negotiate the M4 through his tears.

It was the turn of my heart to sink on our arrival at a rectory that had been converted into an hotel, and not only because the nearby church had not undergone a similar fate. Boyo pointed to the welcome note in our room and sniggered: "Dogs are welcome".

Just as his father believes hedgehogs can sing if you tickle their bellies, Boyo is convinced that the English invented the country hotel for the exclusive pursuit of coitus with canines. He cites fellow Celt GB Shaw to the effect that all the Englishman's pastimes bar gambling and smoking can be shared with a dog.

The result is that he spends our every weekend away in speculating on which of our guests wants, as he puts it, to "canoodle with the poodle".

I chose not to join in, and reflected instead on comments by Gadjo Dilo and Kevin Musgrove - the Brains Trust of Boyo's circle of little electro-friends - on the ephemerality of life.

In brief, Gadjo had an antiquated relative who held that the world might have ended in about 1918. Kevin opined that this may have been true, and that all of our subsequent existence is a group delusion.

This ties in with my view that Boyo and his web-fellows are merely projections one of the other. The thought that we are in fact all but the dying dream of Europa is a comfort to the Spengler Within. Bolshevism, television, congés payés - all a passing nightmare.

If enough bloggers state this "simultaneously and at the same time", as the Welsh have it, will the world awaken from its slumber and finally die?

A consoling thought to get you through many a bad night.

Im Anfang war die Tat

2008-07-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

There's a surprisingly lucid discussion in Gadjo Dilo's Transylvanian keep about tautology.

The issue seems to be whether such verbal redundancy is a sign of ignorance or the sort of speech defect that my father used to cure with a Lada battery and a gasmask.

No Good Boyo and his compatriot Sioba Siencyn - a professional moss-gatherer, I believe - have claimed a particular school of tautology for their pixie patrimony.

These "Welshisms", as they call them during mercifully infrequent forays into English, are marked by a florid declamatory style, often involving auxesis.

Examples they have shared with me include:

a police officer on the Radio 4 "Today" programme saying that the then-flooded village of Crickhowell was "an island, an island surrounded by water";

Mervyn Johns in the film Dead of Night referring to "a nightmare of horror";

another Welsh film character at some point bewailing a "hollow mockery"; and

a Cambrian colleague of Boyo's once causing a mass choking fit in London curryhouse by mentioning a "diametrically opposed opposite".

Anyone who has found themselves suddenly overwhelmed by a Welsh social gathering will notice that repetition is a national identifier both in speech and clothing - belts worn with braces (meaning "suspenders" for my American readers - Welsh denistry is a stranger to tools other than the pick and shovel) , cardigans with jackets and, among the ladies, wigs with hats.

The question to my mind is this: are these true tautological statements, or simply the cotton-gin mechanisms of the Welsh language as applied to the sleek machinery of modern English?

Ход коня

2008-07-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

I am a grown woman. I do not make my own clothes, I buy them. I have a haidresser, not a piece of netting. I believe all religion is pernicious, not only Christianity. In short, I do not read The Guardian newspaper. I do, however, have colleagues with an interest in shamanism who examine its entrails.

They recently extracted a review of apocalytic film scenarios and the realistic expectation of surviving them from the ironically entitled Guide section. In part, it treated the modalities of coping with an invasion by aliens, concluding that they were negligible. I appreciated the endearing tautology, and brought the findings to the attention of No Good Boyo.

Boyo is an afficionado of science fiction, as veteran readers will know only too well. Last night, in his interregnum of relative lucidity between monkey-juice refill No.3 and sleep, I summarised the findings of the Guardian article.

My hope was that he would abandon his fascination with fantasy and apply his pulpy mind to philosophy, child-husbandry and the 'cello.

Boyo scanned the article from his perch on the space hopper, and delivered the following response. (I have it verbatim as I record all our conversations at the urging of my lawyers).

"Fair enough, if they was insects or them lizards. But what if they was all like Valerie Leon out of 'Blood From the Mummy's Tomb', 'Revenge of the Pink Panther' and the 'Carry Ons'? Millions of them, eh? So they enslaves us like this English says, but what if what they wants is to feed on our seed, orally? Don't worry, I'd cope love. Ffyc knows what you birds would do though but. Ha ha Polly Toynbee funnel [remainder indistinct]."

Boyo's operatic ability to see light at the end of the existential tunnel almost warms my heart, and reminds me that the mind of the male is best not understood but simply observed for its curio value.

Courte haleine

2008-07-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

Boyo's joy at having 14 Welsh readers with fingers narrow enough to hit a computer key at a time has set me to thinking about other indices of male inadequacy.

Music is a good measure of whether your companion for the evening stands much chance of remaining at liberty by breakfast.

Adepts of heavy metal are hopeless. The lyrics rush to rhyme before the end of the first line - "Take your daughters to the slaughter", "Thunder across the tundra" - and are invariably faibles.

Jazz is always promising. Shklovsky noted that there are few plot devices, and the same applies to melodies. The ability of beboppers to riff off the most basic standards bodes well for their imagination in other departments.

What music does No Good Boyo like? I hear you ask.

He likes brass bands.

Grand miroir de mon désespoir

2008-06-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

I am having a large mirror fitted to the study wall, so that Arianrhod can practice her haka moves ahead of the Berkshire Under-Fives Rugby Union trials. I can also keep an eye on No Good Boyo's attempts to open pickle jars in the kitchen.

The various morlocks hired to fit it managed to remove the mounted wolf head with Szekler arms akimbo that my grandfather Boykopolk bequeathed to us - the result of one of his least successful crossbreeding experiments.

They failed, however, to bring the boar-tusk brackets I had specified. So the mirror is resting on a pile of Boyo's parking tickets for now.

Boyo thinks the mirror is a bauble of my vanity. Three years together, and he still hasn't noticed that I cast no reflection.

On an Overgrown Path

2008-06-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

Q: What do the following towns - Wallingford, Tamworth, Stafford and Newcastle-under-Lyme - have in common?

A: You will not pass through them en route from our house to No Good Boyo's ancestral tree-trunk in Mid Wales, as they are far far away.

Unless you are No Good Boyo, of course.

Kein Zurück für dich

2008-05-08T07:19:00.000-07:00

I gather that there has been some comment from the unemployable community as to the dearth of posts from the equally indolent No Good Boyo.

This is due to his contractual obligation to translate the next chapter of Anti-Danube by the weekend.

I recently sought to encourage him by glancing at his work in progress. "It could never be completed after your death," I cooed.

He has not left his cellar since.

Bitte denk an nichts. Alles ist gut

2008-04-30T01:26:00.000-07:00

One of No Good Boyo's little friends dreams at night of passing his lunch hour in the bar at work, drinking and talking nonsense with Boyo, "Kronie", "Dazza", "Fuel Rod" and other carbon sacks. The exquisite poignancy is that he spends every lunchtime doing little else.

No Good Boyo thinks this shows a perfect life/dream balance. For once the educated world and Boyo are in accord.

Freud said the key to psychological equilibrium is the Nirvana Principle. Some seek escape from stimulus in suicide and murder, but the well-adjusted achieve it through self-awareness, peaceful recreation and hence restful sleep.

I too have achieved this balance. At night I dream of wreaking vengeance on my current and future subordinates. Then I go to work and do just that.

A Man's World

2008-04-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

Last night, during a television showing of No Good Boyo's favourite roll of celluloid, a "quite bright, at least on paper" friend texted him with the cinematic aperçu "Alien vs. Predator - what more could a man want from a film?"

No Good Boyo thought for a while during the ingestion of several glasses of Batko Voskoboynykov's choicest monkey juice, then texted back "more topless".

I blandly inquired whether this improvement ought to be essayed by a character in the film or a pliant female/ladyboy companion in a domestic/multiplex setting.

He considered this a little longer over continued refreshments, and concluded "during the adverts".

Irony and science fiction do not mix, and there is no need to attend a Star Trek convention to prove it.

Citoyens Sans-Culottes

2008-04-23T02:34:00.001-07:00

Last night No Good Boyo decided to repair his culottes.

It says much about him that he owns a pair of culottes, and even more about my underrated liberalism that I tolerate this deviation.

I insist that he wear them only indoors, on the grounds that he is neither Pablo Picasso nor a Greek fisherman.

As most men grown older they sprout hair from ear and eyeball. Welshmen seem to develop bulbous knees. This leads to unsustainable contradictions with the individual culotte and inevitable rupture.

So, following days of unheeded pointing and whining at his threadbare garment, No Good Boyo decided to repair the rent.

After studying a sewing kit for a good few minutes he vanished in search of scissors, which I had concealed after his attempt to open a jar of gherkins with them.

Some time later he returned with a pair of nail clippers, and produced to cut off the bottom section of the culotte half-inch by half-inch.

He then proposed the resulting uneven flap of linen, with cider and gravy stains intact, as a summer halter-top for our daughter Arianrhod.

Mr Julien Macdonald may need to revamp his Spring Collection in order to retain the title of leading Welsh couturier.

Adam lay ybounden

2008-04-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo drove our car, Old Mossy, to a rendezvous at midnight this weekend. He was proud of the chance to use headlights, and had studied the car manual thoroughly to this end.

Sad to say he did not read the paragraph on the car's reading internal light, and fumbled in the dark for the switch. Like most Bernsteinian revisionists he was happy to settle for any switch, and so drove out into the night with the sun-roof open.

Into the freezing Berkshire night he drove. A pale moon backlit the snowflakes as they settled on his head, muffling his sobs.

Asbo Sprach Zarathustra

2008-03-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Performed on a chromatic array of hollowed-out teenagers' skulls.

Live teenagers' skulls.

"Affectations can be dangerous."

2008-03-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo took me for our first drive the other day.

He hit a drainpipe, scraped a wall, and drove into a ditch from which he extricated the car only by taking felt off a shed roof to provide traction. He then knocked over a fence post.

Fifteen minutes later, we emerged from our drive. I am not making this up.

The highlight of the rest of the afternoon was a u-turn ("I'm pretty sure this is illegal, you know!") in a narrow country lane, performed for reasons that still escape me.

Mentions are also due for the creative use of windscreen wipers to indicate a left turn and a long and agonised search for the back wiper on a saloon car that naturally does not have one.

The trip to Highgate Cemetery will have to wait.

Мысль изречённая есть ложь

2008-03-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

No Good Boyo recently passed his driving test, and so I am reading legal biographies in preparation for his court appearance. The life and work of Sir Norman Birkett, the president of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, makes one look around Britain and ask “where have all the clever people gone?”

I was struck in particular by this passage from his diary of 29 July 1946, with reference to the Nuremberg court interpreters:

…translators are a race apart – touchy vain, unaccountable full of vagaries, puffed up with self-importance of the most explosive kind, inexpressibly egotistical, and, as a rule, violent opponents of soap and sunlight…

To this one might add “incompetent lechers, virtuosi of halitosis and inept propagandists of shopworn views”. The wretched hygiene, real and political, of the translator is a function of his irrelevance. Like religion, democracy and chocolate wrappers, he serves only to hinder progress towards one’s chosen goal.

As Adorno said:

Intentional language wants to mediate the absolute, and the absolute escapes language for every specific intention, leaves each one behind because each is limited. (1)

Translation merely magnifies the defect, as anyone who has attended an international conference for other than erotic diversion can attest.

I would propose a return to the pre-Romantic ideal of an educated person’s being master of the major cultural languages of his region. And here I stake no claims for my native Ukrainian – a language of use outside our fatherland only in conversing with minstrels and war criminals.

English, French and German would apply in our European case. One, for example, could speak in English while your interlocutor replied in French – each at his ease.

Those unable to learn these languages would hardly have opinions worth conveying to others, and the sums saved on the cabals of interpreters could be usefully spent on improving vocational education.

(1). Quasi una Fantasia, Essays on Modern Music (Translated by Rodney Livingstone), VERSO, London

Eine Schaffende Lust

2008-02-24T16:52:00.000-08:00

Our daughter Arianrhod ferch Saisladdwr was happily hunting down imaginary guinea pigs on her rocking horse this afternoon. I paused from filing my eyelashes to place No Good Boyo's next, artfully crafted web blog entry just out of her reach. She immediately dismounted like a lady and stomped over to fold the tattered sheaf into an "airy plane", which she then guided into the comforting flames of the hearth.

This establishes that what Bakunin called "Die Lust der Zerstörung" trumps sloth among the young.

Later, I placed a pie on No Good Boyo's chest, tuned the television to Lark Rise to Candleford, moved the remote control just out of reach and retired to my bower, amused by the alternating sounds of chomping and weeping.

This gives hope to us all who seek to build a new, but not necessarily better, world.

"The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant"

2008-02-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

The unreliable British winter has produced an early thaw in my humour, and so I have decided to study some of No Good Boyo's native Welsh culture in order to understand why..., well, just why, basically.

I found an Internet publication called Slate, which could not sound more Welsh. In fact, it is an American literary journal of some worth.

On its pages I read a review of the Sundance Film Festival, the very name of which conjours images of "liberal arts" students with inaccurate facial hair and a fear of the word "tailor". A visit would not be entirely futile, however, if only to see the following:

My favourite film at Sundance 2008 was "A Complete History of My Sexual Failures", a documentary about an English waster who interviews each of his old girlfriends to figure out why they dumped him. His project is mostly a failure and leads to various forms of humiliation, including a series of attempts to cure his malfunctioning penis. (My emphasis)

The wretch, pictured above, displays the British inability to link cause with effect. To say that the project is "mostly a failure" because it leads to "various forms of humiliation" is to misunderstand what the cinema-goer really wants.

Optimism is the Five-Year Plan of the Idiot

2007-12-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

To witness the praxis, station yourself outside the Driving Test Centre, Elgar Road South, Reading, at about 1140 tomorrow morning, as No Good Boyo turns up for his driving test.

On entering the Palace of the Caesars in fallen Constantinopole, Mehmed II is said to have recalled the words of Ferdowsi:

"The spider holds the veil in the palace of Caesar,

"And the owl stands sentinel in the watch-tower of Afrasiab".

Or perhaps he just had a vision of No Good Boyo's car.

And when did you last see your father?

2007-11-25T09:52:00.000-08:00

Today No Good Boyo looked unjustifiably pleased with himself.

What have you done? - I asked.

I feel like a king! - he said.

Explain! - I sighed.

Because my little girl is a princess... - he simpered.

I remain Cromwellian.

Bona Mong

2007-11-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is No Good Boyo. Carries our child Arianrhod about, mixes reasonable brandy sours, can talk to taxi drivers. Otherwise, my judgement is pending.