DEAD MAN TALKING

2012-01-12T00:22:00.000-08:00

As a former terminally ill patient myself - albeit with the miraculous recovery power of a Nazi war criminal after eluding extradition on medical grounds - I would like to draw your attention to my 2012 New Year's resolution which is to bring to earth - and not in that terrified fox-on-Boxing-Day-in-the-Chilterns, (may the High Speed Train tunnel its way through Lord Astor's living room way)- all Aesthetic Plastic surgeons. These being merely profiteering Frankensteins masquerading as healers and prepared to remove cut-price poisonous implants from their female victims only if the taxpayer bails them out like spoilt bankers. In fact all private health practitioners who triage patients not on the basis of their medical need but on their Standard and Poors' credit rating can crawl into a hole - preferrably the one with the aforemntioned High Speed train barrelling through it.

As a former newspaper columnist I would like to draw your attention to an observation that will be familiar to any parent, carer or teacher. You know how at least once in your life you will find in front of you a child who is repeatedly very very bad, but despite graduated sanctions, despite patient reasoning, despite the consensus of all the other children and adults, of every fictional role model from books or films or TV in comics or on Club Penguin, despite religion and culture and family and law and the very rules of language itself, will never admit he has ever done anything wrong. Well... Kelvin MacKenzie is that child.

As a former campaigner for equal rights I would like to draw your attention to the recently trumpeted fact that there are now a record number of women in FTSE 100 Boardrooms. Yes from 13% in 2010, today 15% of top Directors are female. This should do for ordinary women's lives at least as much as Dr Strangelove did for the disabled. Congratulations British capitalism on your burgeoning rainbow coallition. All we need are some British Stan O'Neals and all minorities and oppressed people
can rest assured anybody's aspiration can become a reality.

And as former playwright I would like to say that the silver anniversary re-boot of Les Miserables is alternately pompous, hysterical and twee with a hurried, careening narrative and cartoon characterizations bolted to a relentless, corny, corny score ( I have never heard so few tunes stretced across so much time since I was forced to take my niece to see saw Haircut 100 at the Odeon Hammersmith in 1982). Dickens meets Spinal Tap: could you make revolution, love and death less moving? I would trade £1m of revolving sets and 1m decibels of shouted songs for a single ounce of genuine feeling. As self-loving and over-coiffed as the 80's that spawned it... I'm told the book is quite good.

Yes dear followers, the date has changed but evidently FC Naylor hasn't.

FC Naylor

PS Good luck to Mark Hughes in 2012 although I fear "staying up" may be as great a challenge as its Carry On interpretation for my good self.

World Domination

2011-12-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

yMy grandaughter, Frances has had her second birthday party at which the little prodigal spoke words of thanks with lyrical eloquence beyond the wildest aspirations of Little Mix. So I used Frances' recently discovered treasure of conversational excellence to let her know that Father Christmas does not exist. Luckily I escaped castigation from her mother because, being American, Mary has no idea who or what "Father Christmas" is. Although she is quite sure that "Santa Claus" is actually Tim Allen.

The point is I calculated that if you are old enough to talk you are old enough to listen which means you are old enough to be exposed to lies. Or to "artifice" as the BBC TV Nature Department prefers, in suitably Orwellian newspeak, to justify showing two Polar bear cubs in a Dutch zoo while telling us they are actually in the Arctic. Apparently to mention the truth would have disrupted the "narrative" of the documentary. Sigh... I suppose real life can be so uncooperative when it comes to mirroring Robert McKee's Three Act Story structure. Where was Superman during the Indian Ocean Tsunami? Not blowing the waves back from the Sumatran coast, that's for sure. Where was the reluctant hero receiving the call to action during the Fukushima Daiichi Tsunami? Why didn't the BBC cut from an inundated nuclear power stattion to footage of the X-Men scooping up drowning Japanese? After all the X-Men are already mutants so the radioactivity would have been irrelevant. Why didn't Colonel Gaddafi go through a heart-warming redemptive final act like paranoid Robert de Niro in "Meet the Fokkers" or grouchy Jack Nicholson in "As Good at It Gets", free all political prisoners, marry Helen Hunt and move in with the family of WPC Yvonne Fletcher rather than get a bayonet shoved up his arse? Why? Because we live in a random, godless universe, there is no "narrative" and documentaries should reflect that rather than turn the struggle of an endangered species on melting ice caps into an episode of "iCarly". Either that or some producer up in Salford got confused between David Attenborough's "Frozen Planet" and Richard Attenborough's Jurassic Park.

Anyway the little girl was whisked away from me before I could go on to explain the finer points of European politics so i hope no one, in this Eurozone-obssessed political agenda failed to miss that the marvellous Dominque de Villepin has thrown his hat into the French Presidential race. (His actual name is plain old Dominque Villepin, he added the "de" to sound more classy. In the same way Denise van Outen added the "van" to sound more...? I hope Van Gogh didn't add the "Van" as well, I would hate to think one of my favourite artists is called Gogh.)

The reason I bang on about Monsieur Villepin's name is that the only reason this washed-up, right wing has-been with zero popular support could possibly have for entering the race is because Dominique Strauss Kahn (a sort of French Herman Cain, must be the similar surnames)was forced to drop out and clearly tradition requires at least one French Presidential candidate to be called Dominique (a bit like every 1980's English football team having to have a Gary).

In which case I can think of better candidates: Dominic Cork, at least as good a swinger as Dominique Strauss Kahn. Dominic West, but only in his recent guise as Fred West, after all Giscard D'Estaing looked like a sex criminal who might also be Head of Geography (although he did have an affair with the Dutch beauty, Sylvia Kristel but did not take her to the zoo). Dominque Sanda, star of Bertolucci's "Novecento" could stand with the USP of being female and actually French. Dominic Monagahan, the first hobbit President. Domino Harvey, the bounty hunter played by Keira Knightley in her only action film... except she OD'd and died in her bath. Dominatrix Natalie Rowe who used to hang out with George Osborne. Dom DeLuise, Dom Jolly, Dom Perignon (who interestingly was a monk... but not a Dominican - a Benedictine. And who invented a drink, but not Benedictine) Talking of booze, I am rambling on like an Oregon fossicker high on moonshine and mercury poisoning so I may as well drink like one.

Good luck against Man Utd on Sunday, boys.

FC Naylor

SPONSOR = SAVIOUR

2011-11-11T03:44:00.000-08:00

While lecturing my grand daughter Frances on the Great War (she is almost old enough to speak in complete sentences which would make her eligible to sign up in WW1) it struck me that while we stand in silence remembering the war itself and the Department of Health today issues stern warnings of a coming Flu pandemic, our economic dilemmas also mirror the times of ninety five years ago. In fact all we need is a revival of Ragtime, Prohibition, Spats and an army of Creationist preachers marching across America (erm, actually I think we already have the last bit) and we are straight back in 1919. Which is why Britain and France wanting the European Central Bank to flood the markets with brand new Euro notes in order to stimulate growth might just nudge Germany into a position of tempered resistance: given that printing oceans of new Reichmarks to pay huge bills led to inflation rates high enough to make Zimbabwe's Finance Minister dizzy, the undermining of the democratic state, the rise of the Nazi party and World War 2.

Given that our nation is immensely wealthy, with cars parked on Chelsea side streets worth more than houses in Easington,County Durham, paintings on Belgravia walls that could buy businesses in Merthyr Tydfil and enough jewellry on the fingers of shoppers on a single floor at Harvey Nicholls to knock down and rebuild Glasgow's Drumchapel estate, why is the prospect of a mere 0.7% growth in 2012 being called by Vince Cable "economic armageddon". Or even a contraction of 1%, 2%? The Haiti earthquake, Pakistan's floods and Somalia's droughts that's Armageddon! Not the UK's riches, with its stately homes, 250K per week footballers and Canary Wharf billions contracting to one or two hundredths smaller. A teensy weensy bit of sharing from our non-dom Russian emigres alone would be enough to top up all those shrinking teacher's pensions.

But if the concept of sharing and of giving is too revolutionary (as Christmas approaches)here is another solution. With oil prices rising higher than Nikola Zigic in a crowded Birmingham penalty area or Frankie Cocozza's heart rate at a West London house party, the Gulf States have plenty of cash to spare. So why not direct some of it to Greece and Italy and prevent them dragging down and destroying European capitalism like a fiscal Yoko Ono. In fact the synergy between those indebted ancient cultures and the culture-bare Arab peninsula's affluence is unstoppable.

Heard of the Emirates and Etihad Stadiums whose sponsorship funded the wages of Carlos Tevez and the development of the exclusive Highbury Square residential complex? Imagine how the Italian and Greek economies would benefit from selling naming rights in places like Venice where pigeons could flock to Saint Sheik Khalifa's Square or in Tuscany where you can climb the 296 white marble steps of the Leaning Tower of Qatar Airways never mind peering heavenwards at the legendary ceiling of the Vatican's Al Hilal Group Chapel and how much would UAE's plutocrats pay to lease the Dubai Bank Acropolis?

Countrymen you need not dip into your off-shore havens, your tax-free Trusts or your shares and property portfolios, skiing at Vale, dining at Nobu, boxes at the Royal Opera House and strawberries at Wimbledon will all remain affordable once we seal those contracts on the Burj al Nelson in Trafalgar Square and The Victoria and Ali Museum.

FC Naylor

PS FC Naylor would like to make clear that he regards foreign ownership of the means of production no more nor less oppressive than British ownership (but can't help dreaming of an island that turned back both Julius Caeasar and William the Conqueror and Hengist and Horsa, and the Danes) in which women could today walk freely, adorned in nothing but woad. Er and men too obviously , I am not Herman Cain. But, er not because he's black, I don't like Mitt Romney either. But not because he's a Mormon... actually yes because he is a Mormon.

MAGIC BULLETS

2011-11-03T10:36:00.001-07:00

Adam sent me a link to a video clip on the Internet of Gareth Bale scoring twice against QPR last Sunday. I started supporting the Hoops as a teenager when Rodney Marsh joined from Fulham in 1966, Adam has been a Spur since his bris in Highgate some years earlier, so the arrival of this electronic torment was not entirely unexpected. With Pavla's help I sent back a video link to "Gaddafi sodomized by bayonet" an ugly but essential piece of cine verite detailing the birth of liberal democracy in the Maghreb, I offer as tribute to all who supported President Sarkozy's re-election campaign paid for and accompanied on the ground by the Qatari army ,err, I mean "NATO Jets protecting civilians". But my smug schaudenfreude was cut short by the announcement that NATO Jets, rather like Status Quo in the 80's, are not returning to their hangars after another successful tour but are idling on the runway preparing to attack Iran... on suspicion that Iran may be concealing weapons of mass destruction. The last clause in that sentence apparently ringing no bells at all in the MOD, FO, Palace of Westminster, Downing Street, UN, David Kelly's mausoleum, Andrew Gilligan's office. I can only suppose all bells have been disconnected since electricity prices went up 1000% after we privatised all those inefficient customer-unfriendly state utlilty companies staffed by striking Trotskyites in the 80's.

There was a time when "magic bullet" was a figurative term implying some sort of panacea such as penicillin, meditation, cranberry juice, or the (late) Jim'll Fix It (I don't care how much money he raised for charity that man was weird, I would rather my grandson shared a weekend in bed with Wacko Jacko high on "Jesus Juice" than spent sixty seconds in the same studio with that mother-fixated, bling-adorned, tracksuit-wearing bachelor disc-jockey-cum-wrestler). Today however "Magic Bullet" means just that - real actual bullets.

There seems to be no problem a prolonged spanking by a Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Mirage F1, F16 Fighting Falcon, Tornado GR4 and their complement of Tomahawk ,Brimstone and Paveway missiles (the former two sounding like tag team wrestlers from the WWF in the Hulk Hogan era, the latter like a Department Store Home-Loans spinoff company)cannot solve.

So beware not just Natanz, Qom and Arak, all "problems" are now liable to the NATO Jet solution: Greece, St Paul's, the favelas of Rio, the malarial mosquito, the HI Virus, Anorexia, MIlton Keynes Dons, Jeremy Kyle, gluten, that back-chatting schoolgirl Molly off "Educating Essex", , Jack Whitehall, people who split infinitives, Sickle Cell Anaemia, all blonde newsreaders worldwide, Ryanair (it's a Sidewinder air-to-air for you lot), Alan Green, Cher Lloyd, Bugaboo Strollers, middle-aged media men head-to-toe in figure-flattering black: you look like bald Ninja weaklings, the Boden catalogue, my ex-wife's new husband Alistair.... Hm, maybe not such bad idea after all.

FC Naylor

Won't Get Fooled Again

2011-10-22T11:06:00.001-07:00

I was on my way to St Paul's Cathedral to join the anti-capitalist protestors' camp when it dawned on me why the Metropolitan Police were unable to stop this occupation. Well, if a front garden can be "occupied". Now that Bob Lambert has joined Jim Boyling and Mark Kennedy as yet another outed police-infiltrator in the eco-warrior movement we finally have the real explanation as to why there are so few bobbies on the beat these days. They are all getting off with tattooed vegan hippies in tents outside power stations. The geuine male animal-rights activists and tree- squatters unable to compete with the superior disposable income and hunky meat-diet physiques of these double agents. Which is not only unethical, unlawful and a collosal waste of police sperm, but also gave the opportunity for a bunch of real villains in the summer(mainly school truants and twenty-somethings whose purchasing power was hampered by a credit rating less than of a Greek Bingo Hall) to set fire to Croydon.

But of course such civil disturbances appear as harmless as Trick or Treating in Gerrards Cross compared to NATO-sponsored street-wars in Sirte, Triploi and Bani Walid where heroic French jets successfully bombed a convoy of Gaddafis from tens of thousands of feet in the air. Why, Les Bleus have not engaged in such valorous combat against fleeing North Africans since the Paris police drowned one hundred Algerians in the Seine exactly fifty years ago this week!

At least the new Libyan government avoided the charge of lapsing into Ancien Regime barbarity following the capture of the helpless wounded Colonel. Immediately adopting the liberal, democratic values of the West they emulated those proud American Navy SEALs who captured Bin Laden in Abbottabad this year, and killed the fellow stone dead.

Finally good luck to the All Blacks tomorrow. I hope New Zealand pulverise the French in the Rugby World Cup in a stadium yards away from where the French Secret Service mined the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. At least British agents only sleep with committed environmentalists rather than blowing them up.

FCNaylor
On Twitter @FCNaylor

MOBOS AND WOWOS

2011-10-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

In 1969 I saw the original production of Hair - of course for the full frontals and also because Cressida paid for the tickets. I also bought Melting Pot by Blue Mink so I am very much of the "black and white unite" school of politics.

I am not absolutely sure who Jesse J is other than she has an incomplete surname so I presume she is an existential everyman like Josef K but I understand there has been some carping about her winning so many of this year's Music Of Black Origin (MOBOs) awards on account of Miss J not being black herself. And yet the lyrics of Soul, Rap, Reggae and R&B all being in the English language technically constitute Words of White Origin (WOWOs). Is it not in fact the uniquely syncretic nature of contemporary Western musical culture with tangled roots that spread from West Africa to the West End, and the Church Choir to the Speakeasy that makes it so universally appealing. (My only concern is quite how it took six people to write "Do It Like A Dude")

I feel remiss at not having mentioned Angelic American Sex Kitten Amanda Knox whom some people continue to regard with suspicion. All I can say is - a legitimate court of justice examined and that same legitimate court of justice acquitted. And everyone agreed with me while I was at Nicholas van Hoogstraten's chatting to Sion Jenkins, Silvio Berlusconi, Steven Gerrard and (on Skype) O.J. Simpson.

FCNaylor

RAPACIOUS BILLIONAIRE TOYMAKER DIES

2011-10-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Back in the day when I made Richard Briers look like John Galliano, dressing in corduroy jackets and tank tops like an Open University lecturer - well, I was an Open University lecturer - Economists called it "Built-In Obsolescence". Washing machines, irons, cookers, toasters deliberately designed to fatally break down after a few years so you would be forced to pour more of your wages into capitalism's gaping maw, fossil fuels burnt, new metals torn from the scarred earth, old metals tipped into landfills like the mass graves of war or incinerated like Viking chiefs. Had Asgard been a G-Plan kitchen.

Now they call it "Upgrading." or as Steve Jobs preferred "Permanent Innovation." The phrase seems to have been adapted from Mao Tse Tung's "Permanent Revolution" which is probably how the Foxconn mega-factory in Shenzen, Guangdong Province ended up making all of the iPods' and iPads's components as well as being the suicide capital of the electronics industry. Or "Silicon Cemetery" as I like to call it, where 14 workers took their own lives in 2014. At least the others could plug into iTunes to muffle the screams.

Every year Apple brings a slightly faster, lighter, smaller version of last year's PodPadPhoneMac so you can throw the old one away. Each new model having a number 3G, 4, 4s tagged onto the end of its name like a dangling baby's appendage to disguise the fact, like all those Friday the 13th Parts, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, that what you are really buying is not a sequel but a remake with a slightly younger cast. This addiction to the latest version of the gadget being bought, of course, by card nicely stoking the boom in consumer credit, which like night follows day, quickly morphed into consumer debt and helped bring down the economy of the entire Western World. And while, after the crash, Apple's shareholding entrepreneurs can slump onto the plush cushions of billionaire assets and comfort each other on Whale Womb in Maduka Honey and Scotch Bonnet at The Fat Duck or The Ivy (whose profits are up in 2011) the rest of us make do with a bumpier landing of Greggs'sandwiches while queuing outside LiDL.

But I will miss Graham Dilley.

FC Naylor

The Godfather Part 4

2011-09-05T05:05:00.000-07:00

Whether he be Grendel to my Beowulf or as grapes were to Tantalus, I promised in my book (remarkably still available on Amazon.com - they have even added a Look Inside feature) I shall chase Tony Blair surer than a shadow chases the sun or Dominique Strauss Kahn, skirt. No need, the man, now in semi-retirement but working part time to bring peace to the Middle East offers himself up as a target not even Robbie Earnshaw could miss. (What is it with British centre forwards called Robbie: statistics suggest Messrs Keane and Fowler seem to have scored many goals but never when I was watching.)

Not only has the devout statesmen been exposed as a close personal friend of Colonel Gaddafi's head of Intelligence, it turns out that he was not just a friend of the most malevolent media mogul since Goebells, he was part of the News International family. Though what with authorizing all that renditioning and torture I am amazed Tony found the time to attend Grace Murdoch's christening. The list of the former leader's actionable corruption, deceit and illegality (selling peerages, taking bribes, covering up other's bribes, inventing reasons to go to war, faking an Estuarine accent even less convinicng than Guy Ritchie's, sacrificing kittens to the Pope) is so long that if Ed Miliband doesn't denounce Blair at the upcoming Labour Party Conference, like Kruschev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, or Kym Marsh denounced Myleene Klass in Hear'Say... then we are all doomed.

Not that our neighbours across the channel are better role models when it comes to sloughing off poisonous legacy. Nicolas Sarkozy,(notice the lack of 'h' in his first name just like Nicolas Cage - I hear they were both up for the same part of the maturbating junky cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans but Sarkozy demanded it be filmed in old Orleans instead, sadly without seedy jazz bars though it does have a nice statue of Joan of Arc) who, like Fettes's favourite son, also started a war against an Arab country for the purposes of ego and oil, and so that he would have more in common with fellow French leader Napoleon than just his shoe size (he has feet smaller than Shirley Temple). Sarkozy has not said a word against France's criminal former President Jacques Chirac, who while Mayor of Paris for almost twenty years invented over 2000 bogus jobs and took all the wages to fund his political party. (Chirac's mayoralty also had an annual food expenses bill of 15 million Euros, which is a fuck of a lot of Duck Houses). A trial however has finally arrived. The embezzling Charlemagne however is using the Ernest Saunders / Ronald Reagan defence - he cannot remember anything about the period. This would make Chirac the first modern Mayor of a major city never to have kept any paper documents, computer files or records of any kind whatsoever, everything he had to do in his 18 years running the capital of France he wrote in biro on his hand next to a drawing of Brigitte Bardot's lips which if he moved his finger and thumb in the right manner made it look as if she was (French) kissing.

I was going to comment next on The Guardian's front page shock headline earlier this week: "Homelessness could spread to middle class, Crisis study warns". Yes, no longer will there be some Scouse monkey with a whippet on a string, breath stinking of Belgian lager, arms oustretched begging for cash to buy some skunk staggering the streets of the West End like Romero's Living Dead but a chap named Harry or Josh with a microchipped Parson Russell Terrier, scent of Pinot Noir around his "King of Shaves" moisturized face, politely asking for a short term advance so he can have his Peugeot (in which he now lives) valeted, and "oh and by the way would you like to buy a copy of GQ?"

I was going to... but I have forgotten.

FC Naylor

HOME AND AWAY

2011-08-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

Just home from India... and contrary to predictions, FC did not get the runs! Bell and Prior and Pietersen however did, so that elevated my mood higher than the local Bhang. More good news is the un-looted status of my home. Less good news is the four-nil thrashing QPR received in their first home game - all of which has imposed the theme of home on my thoughts.

For instance why did I not cry but chuckle when Richard Branson's home on Necker was hit by lightning and burnt down? A laugh that rose to a guffaw when I heard Kate Winslett was in it. Is it because something deep and primal in the human psyche keeps repeating it is wrong for a man to own his own tropical island - unless you are Jeff Tracy or Francisco Scaramanga, in which case it should be to house the secret HQ of International Rescue or a "Solex Agitator" not some luvvie who conned her way to an Oscar by speaking like Herr Flick from 'Allo 'Allo and twitching her eyes like a horse being put down at a race track.

I have also been giggling over the eviction at Dale Farm in Essex. After decades of unlawful trespass the Irish Traveller's Community has been finally asked to move on... and is protesting vigorously! Why? You are Travellers , move on is what you do, I mean "travel" is part of your name!

Meanwhile the home town of Muammar Gaddafi is being bombarded by NATO jets concurrently with a ground attack by rebel forces - all under the auspices of the strict UN Security Council mandate "to protect civilians from assault". Which means the bombs are indeed legitimate under international law... if they were falling on the invading Benghazi forces pouring into the city shooting everyone they see. I am frequently puzzled by the condemnation of Gaddafi (guilty of many other sins)for "using force against his own people" given that he is doing so on account of having been "attacked by his own people (for reasons good and bad). It is a bit like condemning a battered wife for "using force against her own husband" as he punches her.

It is not whom you attack that confers legitimacy or attracts opprobrium, it is why you attack. That applies to NATO and Gaddafi.

And while on the subject of unprovoked assault, I would like to officially welcome midfield scrapper Joey Barton to Loftus Road. Please don't hit me.

FC Naylor

@FCNaylor on Twitter

THE REVOLUTION IS NOW

2011-08-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

I am making my first visit to India on Thursday, paid for by Cressida's guilt money. In the last week my multi-millionaire ex's wealth has fallen faster than morale in the Upton Park dressing room after Fat Sam's managerial appointment - I know Mr Allardyce prefers "Big" Sam but I think he shares more qualities with the corpulent deluded crime lord from Bugsy Malone than any wrestler, cowboy or porn star who properly earned the sobriquet - but luckily she offered me the tickets before some Actuary with an MBA from Harvard, the foresight of the Mayor of Pompeii and the sense of responsibility of American Psycho stuck a pin in a chart and lowered the credit rating of the only country he has ever visited.

I shall visit the jewel in the crown of our former empire with the requisite humility of a hitherto spoilt Western consumer... and the swaggering glee of a cricket fan who shall never fail to enquire as to the health of Zahir Khan's hamstrings while munching beef burgers and pouring scorn on reincarnation. As an avowed internationalist anti-Imperialist and communist I feel less personal guilt about the Amritsar massacre than I feel suspicion about MS Dhoni abandoning the technology for LBW reviews. Consequently I am far more obnoxious a visitor than any British bourgeois liberal who forgives any foreign misdeeds as penance for Cecil Rhodes, the East India Company, the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion and all those deportees from these shores who exterminated the Aboriginies.

I do feel bad about being clothed head to toe by Primark - partly the globalization thing, partly the fashion thing. But obviously not as bad as the young black revolutionaries of Haringey who strode peacefully past the doors of that high street thrift icon on Saturday night with the purposefulness of the Angel of Death on Passover, on their way to JD Sports, Currys Digital and Tesco's Finest Range. And before you send a link to this blog to the Daily Mail bear in mind I speak as a man who took active part in the 1981 Brixton riots. Yes it was partly a white man's ire at not being able to score his weekend's ounce of dope on Railton Road but it was also a frustrated cry of defiance against Thatcher's war on the working class and the police's racist persecution of my black brothers and sisters. 2011's Tottenham's trigger was less a heroic insurgency against neo-fascism and more about grievances over Spurs' probable sale of Luka Modric to Chelsea and a deep social hunger for a new telly, some trainers and a nice bit of carpet. Cynthia Jarrett was an innocent old lady who died during a police raid on Broadwater Farm in 1985, "Starrish Mark" was a known armed gangster. He has less connection to Rodney King than to Burger King, and the subsequent setting fire to people's front gardens more in common with the KKK than the NAACP.

So I temporarily leave this island collectively trying to figure out if the face behind the mask is that of Zorro/Batman/an extra from the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut or a the Dentist from Little Shop of Horrors / a knife-weilding truant after an XBox 360; and I
begin my latest adventure as The Class Warrior in a Panama Hat quenching a thirst built up touring the Taj Mahal with chilled Evian while the masses pray for clean tap water while nobody will lend the United States of America a single biro lest they not give it back.

Life hasn't been this confusing since Araucaria' last bank holiday crossword with a grid sans numbers and the theme of the novels of Honore de Balzac.

FCNaylor

(On Twitter @FCNaylor)

RIGHT OF REPLY BY ANDREW COULSON

2011-07-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Why is everybody picking on me? Is it because I am from Essex instead of the Cotswolds? Maybe its my name? Yes, the Nixon aide who hired Watergate burglar Howard Hunt was called (Chuck)Colson. But I am called "Coulson". And anyhow I'm English and he's American. Not that I am anti-American. My ex-boss Rupert is American. (Well Australian actually. He is a naturalized American.) My ex-boss's wife Wendi is American.(Well Chinese actually. She is American on account of having ana adulterous affair with and subsequently marrying and then immediately divorcing the American husband of the woman who sponsored her US student visa despite him being 30 years her senior) In fact I know them both well. It was my idea that Rupert (37 years her senior) as an engagement present, get Wendi Imelda Marcos's complete shoe collection as an engagement present, plus a Myra Hindley haircut, be married in Anna Nicole Smith's wedding dress (the only thing she inherited from J Howard Marshall - 62 years her senior- after her step-kids got in the way. So better hire a good lawyer, Wendi: I hear Tom Crone is available)and fit into their Manhattan penthouse the exact bathtub in which Countess Elisabeth Bathory bathed in the blood of virgins.(Conrad Black's wife Barbara Amiel was bored with it).

It was also my idea to hire private investigators: the raincoat, the fedora, the striped shadows cast by neon lights squeezing through Venetian blinds , the clipped voice over, the straggly mullet behind hollowed-out eyes, planting cocaine on a mother so she'll lose her kids, putting an axe through a man's head in a South London car park... everyone loves a gumshoe.

As for James Murdoch's image, that was down to me. The wire-framed glasses that are meant to make him look benign and scholarly like Harry Potter... my idea. Not my fault he actually looks like a brown haired SS Officer and speaks in an accent never before heard to come out of a carbon-based life form.

If I'm guilty of anything its giving the public what they want: photos of dominatrixes in military uniform wearing James Murdoch's glasses, the bloke off Red Dwarf in the back of a taxi smoking crack, Dirty Den having a wank, close ups of Amy Winehouse slowly dying before our eyes, Natasha Giggs' tits and the messages on a dead girl's phone. Even the Guardian said it was a bad thing for British journalism that the News of the World shut down, like Milwall dropping out of the League

As for not being fit to sit in Number Ten, at least I didn't invade a Third World sovereign Arab Muslim state like Tony... Eden in 1956. And the only other candidate for PM's Director of Communications was also from NOTW... the fake Sheikh. You were lucky to have me.

Andrew Couslon has donated his fee for writing this column to Champneys Health Resort and Spa.

FC Naylor (@FCNaylor on Twitter)invites readers to nominate a new Director of Communications for Number Ten, and a new job for Andy Coulson.

NEWS OF THE LABOURS

2011-07-05T12:43:00.001-07:00

It has been a less than active week, a Berbatovian spurt of activity followed by sedentary indolence. This is not good for my sistolic count, not so much because of the lack of physical exercise but because my main pastime is reading and reacting. Often splenetically.

Colin Montgomery, a golfer with the physique of a footballer - if that footballer happens to be Ronaldo (Brazilian Ronaldo not Adam's Apple Ronaldo) or Ronaldo McDonald as I like to call the Corinthian Humpty - prophesied with the coviction of Joseph Smith channelling the Angel Moroni that Rory McIlroy had no chance of winning the US Open because of his poor putting.

McIlroy won by 8 shots.

Now the Nostradamus of the bunker has declared that Rory has no chance of winning the Open because his "brain is tired". No Colin, your brain is tired. Colin Montgomery by the way will not win the Open a) because he has not qualified to be in it and b) because he is Colin Montgomerie which is Gaelic for "second place at absolute best you fat choker".

Then the President of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists announced (in an understandably desperate bid for more adequate staffing levels)that current research shows that almost half of mental health patients do not feel safe in hospital. Given that nine tenths of mental health patients in hospital were admitted with either diagnosed anxiety or paranoia, the average bloke would consider that a pretty good outcome. Funding denied.

Then England manager, Hope Powell puts Birmingham's Karen Carney on the bench for the first two group games in the Women's World Cup! For those of you that do not know, Carney is the footballer that Joe Cole was meant to become: inventive, tireless, holds the ball, can play a one-two, dribbles, takes players on, pings long distance defence-splitting passes like Glen Hoddle (before he declared holy war on Satan's wheelchair demons), crosses like Beckham (before the weight of his own tattoos and the stress of trying to get Victoria to eat her dinner wore him out) and scores goals from midfield like Frank Lampard (before the breakfast succubus, Christine Bleakley drained him drier than a post-Yoko John Lennon). Before Carney came on as sub against New Zealand England were over the one and half games played 2 -1 down. Since she came on and subsequently started against Japan we have won both games, scored 4 and let in 0.

Lastly my outburst of energy was expended supporting Pavla as she joined 16,000 brave women run 5 kilometres in blazing sunshine and oppressive heat round Blackheath common to raise money for cancer charities. A noble cause besmirched only by some lads who clearly thought this was the biggest pulling opportunity since World War One purged Britain of a generation of young men, and stood at the finishing tape with bottles of cold water, a comforting arm and a chat-up line of "sorry about your Nan". News of the World staff no doubt.

Which brings me on to the NOTW, formerly New Labour's favourite newspaper. Who remembers Tony Blair flying out to Oz in 1995 to sing Murdoch's praises at a News International junket. It isn't just Cameron who consorts with turds like Coulson and Brooks and the horseflies that orbit them.

Make a stand, burn down Wapping.

FC Naylor

NOT AS BAD AS IT SEEMS

2011-06-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

Pavla's husband, that vulture (I think he used to be part of some private equity fund - Cannibal Capital or the like)has been looking at last minute holiday deals in Greece. You can buy a whole island in exchange for food, apparently. "Beware Greeks bearing gifts" was a famous epithet coined by the Trojans, well the six of them who survived getting Fallujah-ed by Agamemnon. (Come to think of it, General "Surge" Petraeus sounds a bit Greek.)

The maxim still applies it would appear, since it turns out those gifts were never actually gifts but loans that now need to paid back. As a socialist and internationalist of course I feel solidarity for those scruffy tax-evaders who seem to retire before they have even stopped growing. So my brotherly advice is: default on your debts. All of them. Let the usurer/casinoes (aka banks) take a haircut instead of the tax payer. Subsequent Europe-wide financial collapse? Bring it on. I guarantee it will have far less effect than threatened, worse than German E-Coli perhaps but not as bad as Mexican Swine Flu.

Other "not-as-bad-as-it-looks news" is the appointment of Ayman al-Zawahiri to the recently vacated top position at al-Qaida. Not as bad as it looks. Initially this promoting from the inside would suggest a guarantee of continuity. However, according to experts, the former Number Two is "more confrontational" than bin Laden was!! Hopefully this means he will invest in fewer project proposals made to his homicidal Dragon's Den. It is further said that al-Zawahiri is "less of a unifying figure" than Osama. Well, we all know what happens when you lose the dressing room... So more good news for al-Qaida's opponents aka "the living".

I also learnt that the old Egyptian surgeon was allegedly elected by AV and that nobody actually voted for him - he just scoopped up a lot of second preferences. Apparently
Sam al-Lardyce was the early front runner, so let us be at least thankful al-Qaida didn't give the job to a long-ball terrorist - that sounds particularly dangerous.

Lastly, the depressing news of plucky Brit, Katie O'Brien going out again in straight sets in the first round at Wimbledon (this time to a 40-year old from that temple of tennis, Japan) could be a cloud with a silver lining. Hopefully she will now give up tennis for good.

Better still all female British tennis players will retire. And we will be spared watching an entire generation of misguided fools plunge defenceless into Russian cannon like the Light Brigade with racquets for sabres; stop being forced to witness their slow, inevitable expulsion from the draw like a shoal of porpoises gradually falling extinct. Plus, Virgina Wade was raised in South African, Anne Keothavong's parents are Laotian, Elena Baltacha is Ukrainian and Laura Robson is Australian, what are all these foreigners doing playing tennis for Britain?

They should be playing cricket for England.

Who have just prevailed over the war-ravaged islet of Sri Lanka. The summer is full of hope after all.

FC Naylor

A STRAIGHT BLOKE IN EDINBURGH

2011-06-15T01:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for beng absent for so long. Those of you who feared my blog had been rendered inactive due to my abduction by Syrian Intelligence agents, thank you for your concern, but the rumour is false. Neither is it true that FCNaylor is the nom de plume of some attention-seeking American post-graduate twat in Scotland.

Proper blog next week, been very busy spending time this month with Bruno, Borat, Ali G, Dennis Pennis, Frank Sidebottom, John Shuttleworth and Noel Edmonds.

Please God don't tell me the last one is real!?

FCNaylor

WORDS, FORGOTTEN AND BRAND NEW

2011-05-27T01:37:00.000-07:00

I went to support a local theatre last week and watched some improvised comedy. A nice young chap asked the audience to suggest for his character, a super power that wasn't really that powerful. I was about to proffer "The USSR 1969-1989, the Detente to Perestroika years" when someone else called out "the ability to spoonerize". The young drama graduate spent the subsequent few minutes playing a giant spoon.

This was actually quite entertaining but it did fortify my conclusion that young people know a great deal less than they should. Of course Adam, being both a liberal and paying giant sums to send his teenage sons to private school, stood up for them and said this was not true: they simply know different things - like how to upload photos onto Flickr from an iPhone while masturbating in zero gravity, the middle names of all the characters in TOWIE and where to find the funniest video footage of a cat smoking a pipe while driving a taxi on YouTube. Call me an old fuddy duddy but when did knowing what words mean become old-fashioned.

Then I realised that in the modern information age, words can change meaning faster than Cheryl Cole changes hair extensions (apparently the only people in the whole of the the USA who can understand a word she says are Appalachian hillbillies who cannot even understand each other). "Protecting civilians" used to mean setting up a cordon sanitaire around a group of innocent people being beseiged by invaders. Now it means bombing regimes in Oil- rich nations distrusted by the West into rubble.

And talking of protecting civilians, the marvellous job done by Dutch UN troops back in 1995 at Srebrenica is in the news again after the successful capture of Bosnian Serb General, Ratko Mladic. Taken alive, no less, not dumped in the Indian Ocean in his pyjamas. Alive but too ill to face trial...

Because Mladic, upon his arrest "Mubaraked". New word, this: "to Mubarak" is to collapse ill, certainly too ill for trial, after previous good health, at the precise moment of being held to account for a lifetime of untouchable wickedness. It is named after the fallen Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose sweet pink heart trembled too fast and gave way when he was about to be put into a Sharm el-Sheikh dock on account of being a murderous, toturing pig. Days later the phenomenon repeated itself when Mrs Mubarak was arraigned for trial for being a torturing murderous pig's wife, thereby having blood on her handbags. Mladic, a hitherto robust psychopath suffered it this week in Belgrade but there are antecedents in the UK.

Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw sent torturing, muderous pig, General Augusto Pinochet back home to Chile to put his feet up with a glass of chilled Frontera Carmenere after an enfeebling Mubarak episode in his Virgina Water mansion while awaiting extradition to Madrid. And staff-sacking, convicted thief and fraudster Ernest Saunders wheedled his way out of England's own Devil's Island hell hole, Ford Open Prison after Mubaraking his way ito the history books as the only man ever to completely recover from Alzheimer's Disease.

Kindly and civilised man of letters, FC Naylor, says carry on the trial over their quivering, breathless bodies, the homicidal fucks. (And shove the criminal Guinness plutocrat back inside, to boot.)

Please don't tell me off for my bad language, I think I've got a head coming on.

FC Naylor

Follow on Twitter @FCNaylor
Buy his book on amazon.com

COUNTING THEM BACK IN....

2011-05-18T02:39:00.000-07:00

The Swiss surprised me this week with their humanity. A referendum on proposed legislation to ban suicide tourists was very heavily defeated. "Rest of the world - you are still welcome to come to Switzerland... and kill yourself!" Some of the federation's anti-foreign elements have carped "They come over here, they take all our bodybags, they leave." but 80% voted to let them/us in anyway.

Of course you could argue that encouraging foreigners to visit your country in order to be immediately killed is actually anti-foreigner. "How do we get rid of those pesky foreigners who keep nagging us to reveal the bank accounts of African dictators and corpoprate embezzlers and go on and on about Nazi gold this and Nazi gold that... ? Invite them round and leave them in a room with a plastic bag,a rubber band, paracetemol and whale music."

Don't get me wrong, I support the inalienable right to take one's own life and ask for assistance if needed. If one is not permitted ownership of one's own body then truly we are all dispossessed. But when it comes to opening borders, the Swiss are less likely to invite in refugees and more lilkely, the terminally ill. The latter, I suppose rarely overstay their visas.

Maybe next year the Swiss entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (Pavla loves it even though I told her the East Europeans always spoil it by voting along old Warsaw Pact lines) could be themed around their key cultural icons: chocolate, clocks, racism (traditionally expressed by their footballers spitting at Steven Gerrard, but you can go to Manchester for that) and topping yourself. All in the lovely music capital that is Azerbaijan's Baku (just don't mention the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It's like celebrating Mass in Latin on an Orange parade).

And while on matters, European, I hear the IMF's elegant French boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been placed on suicide watch at New York's Riker Prison. Perhaps his lawyer can organize a ticket to Switzerland?

Less morbid thoughts next week.

Finally, good luck to AFC Wimbledon in the gambleyourselfintochronicdebtandmarriagebreakdown.com Play Off Final and bad luck to Milton Keynes Dons in theirs. Never mind Ali-Frazier, Pacquiao-Mayweather, Ovett-Coe, Nadal-Federer, Bolt-Gay, Hulk Hogan-Andre the Giant, Palmer-Nicklaus, Woods-Mrs Woods, the "real" Dons versus Millioniare Pete's Body-snatching Usurper Cheats show-down could be a mere season and a bit away!

FC Naylor

Twitter @FCNaylor
Amazon.com Books

THE SMOKE CLEARS....

2011-05-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

Mary, my American daughter-in-law has been celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden. We in the UK find such public rejoicing at the killing of an enemy a little nettlesome. Even though our most popular King is Henry VIII famous for spearing boars, decapitating Queens and setting fire to Archbishops. And the words used by national legend, Margaret Thatcher upon the successful outcome of the 1982 battle of South Georgia was "Rejoice!"

At least we are now clearer on what happened. Osama was not shot in self-defence in the luxury guesthouse of the Emperor of Pakistan by a life-threatened Navy SEAL whom the evil Vizier had assaulted using his second wife as a club and conjuring a Djinn. Rather, some old bloke in pyjamas who hadn't paid his TV license was allegedly still running the world's deadliest terrorist orgainsation since SPECTRE using only pigeon post and messages written in paper darts while sharing the premises with nine children, like an Arab Fagin.

Who knows? Perhaps there would have been the opportunity to put the homicidal fanatic on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague had the Americans not crashed one of their helicopters in Osama's garden. Still, better than three helicopters packing up, which is what happened in 1980's Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue American hostages from the Embassy in Tehran.

I must confess however to rejoicing most ostentatiously at the discomfort of Britain's villanous Nick Clegg, the oleaginous Cantabrian millionaire whose ingratiating insincerity makes Noel Edmonds look like Nelson Mandela. Waving goodbye - with an intensity more theatrical than Maria Callas being attacked by a shark - to Clegg's pompous pledge to change history by reforming the electoral system, and to hundreds of his Councillors, it is increasingly hard to find anyone who admits they "agree with Nick." I can't think of a descent from hero to zero more vertiginous since Leslie Grantham had a wank on the Internet. Yes, I am comparing the LibDem Leader to a convicted murderer. And it does make me feel guilty so doing. After all, Leslie and I are both from Camberwell.

Actually my chum Adam is a Liberal Democrat. He is also a fan of The Apprentice and I do find both sins difficult to forgive, not just because Alan Sugar tried to drive my hero, Terry Venables out of football. Nor because of those awful old Amstrad computers, the Skodas of I.T. but because The Apprentice is quite simply Big Brother... for snobs.

Off instead to re-watch "Seve Ballesteros: The Definitive Story of a Golfing Genius" on DVD.

Vaya con Dios, corazon de leon!

FCNaylor

On Twitter @FCNaylor
On Amazon.com in books.

THE CORPSE MADE NO COMMENT

2011-05-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday teasing Pavla over her infatuation with Pope John Paull II, whose beatification she was watching. If the late Pontiff really did execute the miracle cure of Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand's Parkinson's Disease why didn't he do it for Michael J Fox, at least someone's heard of him? But the real news was elsewhere. Within three days of each other, Henry Cooper, Ted Lowe and Osama bin Laden all died. Which means we will never get to see Our 'Enry left hook Al-Qaida's finest in a dream bout commentated by the incomparable whispering Ted.

I notice that Seal Team Six or The Furious Five or C3PO or whoever, waited until after the Royal Wedding before choppering into the Arab beanpole's compound. Well you don't want to be competing with Pippa Middleton's buttocks in the news cycle. Interestingly this super-villain's hide-out was not an orbiting underwater volcano but in suburban Abbottabad (not to be confused with Nick Hornby's similiarly titled book), the Pakistani equivalent of Aldershot. However the real disappointment for the world's broadcasters was the announcement of a swift execution and immediate dumping of the body at sea, Sopranos-style. The problem for BBCNNBCFOXKY bla bla is once he's dead how do you keep the story going? "Breaking News... Osama, erm, er... still dead. "

No prolonged battle or Raoul Moat-style stand-off with a tipsy Paul Gascoigne offering to talk the Holy Warrior into turning himself in, no neighbours to interview saying "he pretty much kept himself to himself but other than that seemed like an ordinary bloke... when he wasn't plotting Takfiri Jihad against the Zionist Crusader nations. Or having dialysis on his kidney."

No bedside vigil, no political ding-dong over extradition with a pair of Swedish feminists complaining he refused to use a condom, no camping outside the prison, no trial, no grave, nothing. What should have been the biggest, longest-running story of 2011 came and went faster than a LibDem manifesto pledge.

The debate over whether he should have been captured rather than capped (the official American reason was that they don't make those orange suits in his size) and whether bin Laden instigated or simply approved Khalid Sheik Mohammed's independent plan for the 9/11 masaacre is for another arena (the lethal bombing of the USS Cole in Aden was indisputably a direct action of The Base, and an active role in both East African Embassy bombings is not contested either).

For now I shall simply ask the question: now that the figurehead (although not one bomb or bullet was ever discharged in the name of Osama, rather in the name of God) of the Global Jihadi movement is no more, does this render "the War on Terror" more simple or less? Despite what Peter Bergen claimed on CNN, it isn't over.

Must go, Pavla's Rosary beads have got tangled up in her earring.

FCNaylor

On Twitter - @FCNaylor
In book form - amazon.com

DEARLY BELOVED

2011-04-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

Last week's blog caused a bit of a stir especially after Andrew Marr hacked into my account and sounded off about gold-diggers (when all his lover did was have him pay seven years' maintenance for a child that wasn't even his). This week however, the issue of privacy and prurience could not be more relevant as I learn that some, perhaps all, of my nearest and dearest will be watching the wedding of William Windsor and Kate Middleton despite none of them being invited, nor having ever met the couple. I have not been so shocked since Adam confessed to having watched the Paris Hilton sex tape... and my son Toby to having been in it.

I am no more a fan of the Royals than Gerrard Winstanley but to metaphorically lean over the fence and gawp at them as they profess deep love to one another, when one is neither a friend nor family member seems a little rude and intrusive. If they wanted every Tom, Dick and Harry (actually I think Harry might be the Best Man) to get a grandstand view of this intimate and emotional ritual they would have had it sponsored by Cadbury's like Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey did and sold the photos to "OK". Although I don't think the disturbingly shrinking Ms Middleton has had a chocolate bar touch her lips in some time - how sad that this innocuous young woman should already by emulating her late mother-in-law's painful entry to the State's family firm and develop an eating disorder.

And talking of family businesses, all that money that having a Monarchy brings into the UK remains considerably less than a single East Manchester Super-casino would have, before that idea was swiftly scotched as being vulgar and unseemly. Unlike getting a footman to spread Colgate on your toothbrush for you, which is considered a dignified tradition... until Mariah Carey or J-Lo demand it as a rider (along with a roomful of puppies and a statue of themselves made out of marzipan and cocaine)in which case they are labelled "high maintenance" or "mental".

In fact economists have calcualted the Royal Wedding will actually cost the country billions. Yes, billions. Because of the bank holiday that the government has gifted the nation in lieu of libraries, speech therapy and mental health outreach services. In fact more will be lost through this statutory day of leisure than in two decades of strikes. Finally the country is brought to its knees and... not by a trade union of BA Flight Attendants. Which is ironic because Kate Middleton's parents met when they were both... Flight Attendants! (Quite, how a heterosexual man got himself successfully behind an airborne trolley of foil-wrapped Chicken Cacciatore, Toblerone and Longines watches, I don't know).

I wasn't planning to do any work or buy anything this Friday anyway so my contribution to GDP would have been negative anyway. And I suppose taking a day off to get emotionally involved in a wedding constituting of two real people who we have never met is still saner than that of people who are half-real like Channel 4 Gypsies Cindy and Jonny. Or literally don't exist like "General Hospital"'s Luke and Laura whose nuptials got 30 million viewers in the US in the middle of the working day, or Alfie Moon and Kat Slater on "Eastenders".

Thirty tears ago I avoided the saturation broadcasting of Diana's wedding by remaining outdoors from 7.00am until 7.00pm first on the municipal golf course and later on the park tennis courts. I am not as fit today and have fewer friends so if you see a skinny balding chap playing bowls on his own in Dulwich Park, leave him alone... he's having the time of his life.

Provided it doesn't rain.

FC Naylor

NAYLOR'S BACK

2011-04-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Had a most enjoyable visit to the Peaks which included Surprise View, the Heights of Abraham and a subterranean canoe voyage through underground passages within an abandoned lead mine before opening out into Speedwell cave. Clearly the template for several Scooby Doo episodes, it also explained the opulence of Chatsworth House and its grounds. If your knights secure enough land for you and there are sufficient numbers of boys and men willing to work upside down in a hole 12 hours a day for a farthing an hour you can afford to pay Capability Brown to do your garden and Joshua Reynolds to send a few portraits in your direction.

But one cannot doubt the architectural and natural magnificence of the area whatever its provenance. I read a claim that the Peak District is second only to Japan's Mount Fuji in number of visits to a national park. All I can say is that I don't expect quite so many visitors to Fuji this year. Although if the nuclear meltdown continues, Fuji may come to us.

Having impugned the earning methods of the Cavendish family I shall now extend my dissent to cover the lower orders too. To all those spray-tanned, hair-extended, acrylic-nailed, stiletto-heeled kiss-and-tell / fuck-and-publish ladies who haunt night clubs and hotel bars like human bait in a concupiscent fish farm seeking the excitement of celebrity sex, a brief period of paid-for luxury lesiure activities and a £50K severance package in the form of a crocodile-teared, Red Top tell-all detailing every hole and hotel, basque and barbecue shared with the adulterous actor/footballer who eventually dumped: "Do not see these European Human Rights legislation-inspired, privacy-protecting super-injunction gagging orders as a curtailment of your freedom of expression and an impeachment of national sovereignty." (Words seldom off the lips of those in the powder rooms of Chinawhites, Faces, The Blue Bar or Panacea).

"See it as motivation to stop texting and back-chatting in the class room, get some qualifications, a proper job, a modicum of independence and enough self-respect and vision to imagine yourself as a person of value beyond that of a rich, married man's consort.

As for the noble male reporters now deprived of front page scoops - when you told your mum and dad you were becoming a journalist, they were proud because they thought you planned to win a Pulitzer, emulating Michael Herr, Woodward and Bernstein or Pilger and Paxman. Not paying some ex-bent copper to photograph Wayne Rooney having a wank.

And finally the readers... well, it is harder to distinguish between the two Jedwards or the Klitschko brothers (now there's a tag team classic)than to decide who should take up the lower circle of hell in this nest of prostitutes, pimps and Peeping Toms!

Whoaa, that felt good.

Holiday's over... Naylor's back.

FC Naylor
Twitter @FCNaylor
Book on amazon.com

NAYLOR'S HOLIDAY BREAK

2011-04-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

No blog this week as I'm off for a four-day sojourn in the Peak District where I shall be visiting a Stately Home and on old mine, while keeping an eye out for the wise but scurrilous Jacks of Buxton.

FCNaylor

PS Please no one burgle me as I consider insurance companies worse than Triads or Thuggee gangs.

FLOATERS

2011-04-06T23:34:00.000-07:00

I agreed to wheel my granddaughter along the London riverbank this week to feast in the unexpected sunshine before it melts away like an ice cream... in the sunshine. As we perambled over Deptford's Halfpenny Bridge which straddles the local creek (aptly known as The Creek) I entertained the somnolent infant with tales of the Thames' great Frost Fairs which only ceased in 1814 when nature and industry brought to an end the river's seasonal freezing but which had at one stage permitted an elephant to walk across from Southwark to Blackfriars, below the bridge.

What a poor substitute for those days of civic celebration ,I opined to Frances, is next year's planned Queen's Diamond Jubilee river pageant. Still, 60 years as Monarch is some achievement - if being born and subsequently getting old constitutes an achievement, for that is precisely what this barge-athon will be commemorating. No coming first at anything (well, I suppose technically she beat her sister Margaret to being born and also outlived her father... with a little help from cancer) no winning at anything, no getting re-elected, no inventing anything or being good at anything. But then again, selecting Heads of State on the basis of dynastic primogeniture does provide a degree of stability and continuity both socially and politically - or so Saif Gaddafi, Gamal Mubarak and Ahmed Saleh kept telling me over the sound of NATO bombs being dropped on their own allies and Sarkozy buttoning up Napoleon, great coat (at least it fits).

And at least it is just a Thames cruise and not a gold-plated statue of oneself permanently rotating so that it always faces the sun as in the case of Turkmenistan's late supreme leader Saparmurat Niyazov. And according to Lord Salisbury who trumpeted this "thousand boat Flotilla" (a phrase whose cadence is unfortunately close to Lord Hitler's "thousand year Reich") it will be entirely paid for by private sponsors. According to Boris Johnson, standing next to him, the capital cost will be £8 million. But if, in this age of cuts, there is one deserving recipient of a Big Society hand-out, that has to be Her Majesty. Mayor Johnson also referred to the royal river pageant as being a "joyful Dunkirk": so expect the passengers to be bearing gun-shot wounds, carrying ration books, talking cockney and pledging to go and give Jerry a good kicking as soon as Churchill sorts out this Lend-Lease arrangement he is arranging with Roosevelt.

Still if we're lucky, EMI might re-release the Sex Pistol's "God Save the Queen"

No Future......!

FC Naylor

MARCHING, MONEY AND THE MODERN MUJAHIDEEN

2011-03-31T00:28:00.000-07:00

I dragged my doctor friend, Adam onto his first ever march last weekend, opposing the government's cuts package. Andrew Lansley's NHS "reforms" have no support in the medical profession on account of his consultation paper evidently being sent only to himself. Although I understand they have been endorsed by Dr Freddy Patel, the pathologist who concluded that John F Kennedy, Rasputin, Jack "the Hat" McVittie, Sonny Corleone and Anne Boleyn all died from natural causes and the air in Fukushima province is the best cure for asthma.

Personally I was on the march to complain that the savings made by exempting the rich from receiving Child Benefit have already been spent on Brimstone missiles fired daily into Libya (although not on the day Colonel Gaddafi fought dirty and protected himself with a "human shield" aka "the army". Why can't the desert dictator grow some balls and ride into combat on a horse like El Cid instead of ordering anonymous loyal Tornado GR4 airforce personnel to take all the risks, while hiding himself three thousand miles away in a foreign country... sorry, got muddled up.)

Of course in Libya, Saturday's march would have been banned, although I do feel the right to protest was somewhat abused by the group of - I am only inferring this from the masks and attire - rapists on a ski holiday who were headbutting shop windows in Oxford Street. And the right to arrest was abused by the Met Police who, unable to catch the paint-covered anarcho-Ninjas, rounded up a hundred and fifty peaceful UK Uncut demonstrators whose only crime seemd to be going into Fortnum and Mason's and not buying anything. A situation better remedied by Fortnum's taking a serious second look at their prices rather than bobbies hauling their customers before the Beak.

On the subject of money, I had to stop Pavla - whose slumming-it husband is now in debt - from responding to one of those random financial proposal emails from West Africa. "Mr Ogile" from the "Bank of Burkina Fasso" offered Pavla 40% of a $15 millon dormant account if she posed as next of kin of the deceased account holder. I replied that as a deceased person myself I sympathized with the case but insisted on 60% of the profi: Mr Ogile could keep 40%... in exchange for giving me his date of birth, address, bank details, PIN, mother's maiden name, first school he attended, first pet he owned and an X-Ray of his head. That's got to be worth doing for six and half million dollars especially when you factor in the cost of living in Burkina Fasso. For some reason however, Mr Ogile has failed to reply.

Although not technically dead, I was in a coma for the first six months of 2010 (see my book for details) but that doesn't mean I have been asleep since 1979. Unlike the US government whose CIA operatives are covertly supplying weapons and military intel to Libyan rebels. Just like they did to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the Eighties which led to the reign of the Warlords which led to the reign of the Taliban which led to al-Qaida which led to 9/11 which led to another Afghan war which etc, etc. Back then Western political judgement was noxiously clouded by Cold War Paranoia, this time around the escalation seems to be a bit about oil and a lot about not losing face.

FC Naylor

On Twitter #FCNaylor
Book (edited by Luke Sorba) available on amazon.com

SUEZ 1956 REVISITED

2011-03-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

Dear all, below is my speculation on the Libya crisis that contains a mere two (well-hidden) satirical asides only. My regular blog will return at the weekend.

William Hague just ordered Britons OUT of Yemen. But he ordered Britons IN to Libya.

Because Franco-British intervention was NEVER about no-fly-zones or protecting civilians and always about establishing a pro-western regime in an oil-rich Arab country. (A little like Suez in 1956 but over oil not a canal, however with the same US reluctance to commit)That is why Bahrain and Saudi continue un-punished.

However, the Benghazi-based rebellion is essentially a secessionist movement (Benghazi and Tripoli were ruled as separate provinces by the Ottomans for 350 years before the Italians marched in) of religiously conservative Harabi tribes where cries of "Allahu Akbar" and the shooting of African migrant workers do not augur well for the future of Western values.

But then our recent leaders are believers in the Hollywood Theory of History where after taking out The Bad Guy - Saddam, Bin Laden, Gaddafi, Scorpion Killer, The Penguin - a secular, unitary, rights-respecting, gender-equalizing, liberal parliamentary democray will sprout spontaneously like Aphrodite from the foam.

And yet Gaddafi is stubbornly popular in parts of Libya - among many people whose traditions are patriarchal, whose allegiances are tribal and whose ambitions are economic - as a strong leader who maintains stability and defies outsiders.

Solution: the West should not sell arms to repressive regimes in the first place - not even to allies such as Saudi Arabia or Israel - that way we won't end up having to fly round and grab them off them.

FC Naylor

FATAL DISTRACTION

2011-03-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the belated Blog, been busy writing to MP's about the war in Libya after David Cameron followed Mussolini's lead and set off on an Imperial adventure in Libya. Does he know that between c 1550 and 1925 Libya was two separate entities, the vilayet of Tripoli and the sanjak of Benghazi. The current civil war is not between dictatorship and democracy but the reassertion of historically distinct territories, like when Kosovo fought Serbia, Derby play Nottingham Forest or when Millwall play... well, anyone - (when Cardiff play Millwall are they squabbling over Swindon?)

Also got waylaid by devoutly Catholic Pavla - the only book of the Bible she seems to have read is "Revelations" as she once again fears Armageddon is being presaged by a "Beast" from the East. First I reassured her that it was a lethal 10 metre wave that rose from the ocean bed not Godzilla. Then that I was sure that Fukushima Nuclear Reactor 3 would cool down as soon as TEPCO's engineers finished pissing on it from out of a helicopter. (If you doubt this is not one of their contingency plans - remember these are the chaps whose technological genius includes disposing of spent radioactive fuel rods in, essentially, a bowl of water.)

I shared this observation with Adam but his only remark was that being Jewish, naturally he was more acquainted with the Old Testament of the Bible than the New. To which I replied "But don't you want to know how it ends?"

Talking of sin, I was pleased to see Europol breaking up an international child sex abuse ring. However I don't think divine intercession was needed in this case since all the detectives had to do was log onto the organisation's website "boylovers.net". Aside from calling themselves we_are_paedos.com no disguise could have been lese effective since Cleavon Little dressed as a Klansman in "Blazing Saddles".

And it is in the Wild West I shall leave this column with the news that the response in California to a heavilly but legally armed madman fatally opening fire on a group of politicians in an Arizona shopping Mall is not to legislate against arming civilians but to legislate in favour of arming politicians. Which sort of brings this Blog full circle.

FC Naylor

@FCNaylor on Twitter
Book available at amazon.com

boylovers.net

FC NAYLOR APOLOGISES TO THE SUN NEWSPAPER

2011-03-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima... no not the itinerary of the world tour that caused the demise of three consecutive Spinal Tap drummers but reminders as to why I remain a lifelong sceptic about nuclear power (and committed opponent of nuclear weapons). Adam says it is wrong for me to make "political capital" out of a natural disaster. I responded by adding that Kobe University's Professor of Urban Safety, Ishibashi Katsuhiko warned the government and industry years ago that nuclear power plants in Japan have a "fundamental vulnerability" to big earthquakes but was ignored. What else am I meant to say? That we should sacrifice a sheep to the god Poseidon to stop further Tsunamis? Grief and horror should catalyze the imagination into proposing postive change not silent prayer.

I was however anxious as to what inappropriate punning calumnies our scurrilous Red Tops would print under their mastheads in response to this painful tragedy. And upon entering my local newsagent yesterday feared the worst when I caught partial sight of The Sun headline "..pocalypse!".

"They can't have, surely not even they would...", I muttered to myself, before moving closer and being relieved to see the hyperbolic yet neutral text "APOCALYPSE" rather than the offensive "JAPOCALYPSE" that I convinced myself it would turn out to be. I even felt momentarily guilty about my libellous projection. Until today when The Sun's even sluttier sister-paper the News of the World's front page was entirely devoted to Prince Andrew, Frank Lampard and a nameless brunette in a bikini.

Meanwhile Darth Gaddafi expolits the above global distraction (i.e. the earthquake not the girl in the bikini) to continue his counter-attack on rebel forces. However the democratic revolutionaries must be heartened that the Arab League have now convened and officially announced their unequivocal support for a no-fly zone over Libya. I now look forward to the airforces of Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Syria and Jordan scrambling their jets to provide a protective umbrella over their fellow Arab Muslim neighbours. And I know they have these planes because Mark Thatcher sold them to them. I shall cheer the bravery, sacrifice and solidarity of the region as it finally puts its soaring oil revenues ($100 per barrel) not to building a ski slope in the desert or an archipelago of hotel resorts in the shape of a vagina but to good use as the League rises as one to patrol the skies while its brothers and sisters seek liberation.

But then I also look forward to a plume of Hasselhoffian bouffant hair growing back on my big Yul Brynner head.

And if the Arab States for some ineffable reason fail to answer their own rallying cry (Their troops are currently too busy patrolling their own people? They don't really care. "Shit, can't the US and UK do it? We've got twelve football stadiums to air condition before 2018...) then why not the Israelis? Israel is close by. And I know they have these planes because the US gave them to them. Plus they are always saying, with justification, that they are the only liberal parliamentary regime in the region so what better way to disarm the slanderers who defame the country as racist, selfish and Islamophobic than to pop along the coast and support their fellow desert dwelling democrats by knocking out some air defences.

Lots of looking forward then.

FC Naylor

book available at amazon.com
on twitter #FCNaylor

SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING...

2011-03-05T04:13:00.000-08:00

In my younger days, my then wife and I were walking up Cat Bells in the Lake District when I lost my footing and slid on my arse at increasing pace down a very steep and very grassy slope. Nothing was going to stop me... well until something stopped me. Frustrated more at her helplessness than at my distress - Cressida turned to our companion, a nice chap, very fit. "Mark, do something!" she exclaimed as I accelerated out of view.

Of course other than bending down and tearing up the turf like a giant floor-rug or Olympian conjuror's tablecloth and hauling me in , what exactly did she expect Mark to do? Bounce like the Hulk over my disappearing head and scoop me up with a dexterity and rapidity beyond our World Cup cricket team in the field against Ireland? Summon pachiderms like Tarzan to stampede to my rescue trunks rampant? Telekinesis? Freeze time like the Japanese boy on "Heroes". Capture me in a tractor beam and suck me back in, like a shuttlecraft from the Starship Enterprise?

Cressy hadn't thought it through. She just assumed that Mark would know what to do...
because Mark was in the army.

And so it is with David Cameron, whose military savvy extends no further than being bummed in the Sea Cadets at Eton but who now wants to emulate fellow O.E Sir Anthony Eden and drop a Britsh task force uninvited into the North African desert.

I am not a pacifist. I supported the liberation of the Falkland Islands from the invading Fascist forces sent by the Argentinian Junta in 1982 (although sinking the Belgrano was a war crime and I suspect Thatcher deliberately scorned the opportunity of a negotiated settlement) and the UN-sanctioned liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not only wrong on every level, there have been more human rights abuses, detentions, torture, killings, maimings, terror, corruption and nationwide destruction since Saddam was toppled than before... only this time without electricity or running water (unless you happen to be a naked hooded "enemy combatant" in which case you get plenty of both). I also supported the ousting by force of Al-Qaida from Afghanistan after the massacre of American civilians in 2001. But then to stay on to try to transform a medievalist, tribal, patriarchal, nepotistic semi-state into a secular, unitary democracy is more futile than trying to re-form "The Smiths".

I also cheered when Eric Cantona karate kicked that Palace fan in the chest... but then I do support QPR.

Perhaps if the UK stopped arming pretty much every dictator-kleptocrat with a Swiss bank account, villa in France and Prince Andrew's mobile phone number it wouldn't then feel the urge to send its soldiers off to recover its over-priced ordnance like a gang of suicidal repo men.

And now that I have just heard on the radio that an elite unit of Britain's Special Needs Service has been captured in Libya... by its allies(!!) hopefully we can put this issue to bed. (Though I do think we could at least have let Tunisia's tennis players win their Davis Cup match against us in Bolton this weekend!)

No. If the British Conservative Government were serious about making a military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds, it would have sent troops, in 1994 when John Major was in power. To Rwanda.

But it didn't.

FC Naylor

PS By the way, I survived my fall off the Fells when I steered myself into a wooden fence. But I did get a very green bum.

(Twitter #FCNaylor)
(Book "Dead Man Talking - famous last words of FC Naylor" available on amazon.com)

THE KINGS' SPEECHES

2011-02-25T02:44:00.000-08:00

I don't own a car so I have not been listening to the hourly news updates with the same alacrity and "things will never be the same again" despair as those for whom the liberation of the Maghreb and Persian Gulf States will mean... A RISE IN THE PRICE OF PETROL!!! (And the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix!)

But as a former teacher of creative writing I have been entranced by some of the bafflingly inventive speechifying this week, especially the now infamous Umbrella Speech of the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (aka Colonel Gaddafi - one of the world's longest reigning unelected Heads of State at 42 years, though still 17 years behind our own Queen in that respect). It struck me as a sort of hybrid between Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar acceptance speech of 1999 and an Arab version of Shane McGowan addressing a bloke who has just spilt his pint.

Yet despite the understandable urgency to get Britain's do-business-with-anyone oil executives and their families out of Tripoli faster than at the 1942 fall of Singapore, starved Somali beggars were able to swim across the Med to Italy before the UK government's chartered jet made it off the runway at Gatwick, probably due to a passenger having packed 150mg of shower gel and a pair of nail scissors or not having the right change for the toilet.

But I have been more intrigued by the ostensibly coherent and sane pronouncement of the most powerful man in Britain that no one has ever heard of: Paul Kirby, (unelected) Head of Policy Development at Number 10 Downng Street. Curious, as one would have assumed that the Head of Government - i.e. the Prime Minister - would be a shoo-in to double up as the Head of Government policy too?

The visionary Ayatollah Kirby proposes that "the boundaries between public, private and third sector provision should melt away". This self-contradictory conflation being "visionary" in the same way that an alchemist claiming he had conjured up an element simultaneously liquid, solid and gas might be considered visionary, if addressing the Daleks in a Doctor Who episode. Even at a Royal Society meeting in 1660 he would have been laughed at, and presumed to be some Restoration Comedy creation of Wycherley, or an English version of Moliere's Tartuffe l'Imposteur.

Dear Leader Kirby goes on to preach about "freedoms enjoyed by the private and voluntary sectors in real markets where organisations are financially disciplined by the need to earn their living from paying customers by beating the competition" replacing conventional public service provision in a "a holisitic and systemic way".

Given that the disciplined financial freedoms of the market have sunk the global economy into the ocean from which it periodically raises its head, gasps for air, before being pushed back down again like Naomi Watts at the end of Funny Games, the Imperial Grand Wizard Kirby's prayer to the gods of the market seems to me a little mistimed - rather like appealing to asthmatics to smoke their way back to health.

After peeling away it's faux scholarly skin, this trifle of contemporary Big Society cliches tastes identical to the privatisation menu served up years ago by Thatcher and Blair: a poison to completely destroy the welfare state. To impose a model of privately owned, for-profit capitalism instead of a democratically accountable needs' led one.

So let us not allow the wounded roars of "Africa's King of Kings" to drown out the whisperings of the serpent in our own garden.

Here endeth the lesson.

FC Naylor

Twitter - @FCNaylor

Book (Dead Man Talking...) - available on Amazon.com

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE... AND THE ARMY ON YOUR SIDE

2011-02-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

Spent all week listening to the BBC World Service report on events in Cairo's Tahrir Square - a sort of Tiananmen Square without the tanks. Thankfully. I say thankfully because I don't like seeing brave pro-democracy protesters come to harm and I enjoy witnessing dictators fall to earth with no less delight than astronomers do the Leonid meteor shower. I was slightly non-plussed at the liberal media's and Western leaders' celebration of the military coup Egypt has simultaneously experienced. Relishing this popular revolution and then finding out power is now offically invested in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces' Chairman, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi reminded me of my excitement watching indigenous Mayans repel invaders in the film "Apocalypto" deflate swiftly when I read in the end credits it was directed by jew-hating, anti-abortion drunk driver, Mel Gibson. Let's hope Tantawi does not follow the lead of our own dynastic autocrat-toppler, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.

Speaking of puritans, the government of Malaysia have banned couples from any Valentine's Day activities on Monday, claiming the celebration of romantic love is un-Islamic. I find this argument unconvincing given that the Prophet - peace be upon him - loved women enough to marry eleven of them. I shared this insight with Pavla who is looking forward to a Valentine's Day evening out with her husband on Monday and now she is worried that she is going to be harrassed if she gets caught doing a PDA - which I thought was a Palm Pilot-type gizmo but which, I am informed by my son, Toby means public display of affection. I reassured her that the Mutaween rarely patrol Fitzrovia.

My plans for Monday 14th are still in development - I could stay at home and watch any one of Kate Hudson's numerous movie romcoms thereby reminding myself what an infernal ordeal my bacherlorhood is sparing me. Or I could travel to Piccadilly Circus and educate the intoxicated perambulating fornicators that turn up at the shrine of "Eros" that Alfred Gilbert's little statue characterizes the selfless philanthropic love of the Earl of Shaftesbury for the poor, is sometimes given the name "The Angel of Christian Charity" and is about as appropriate a symbol for shagging as the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur.

But perhaps I shall spend the day contemplating the fact that due to the eye of the world being understandably on Egypt on February 11th it went unnoticed that that same day was also the 21st anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela from Victor Verster Prison. Let us hope that Egypt's political liberation be steered in the spirit of that legendary freedom-fighter.

And now, time to slip "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" into the DVD player and thank Cupid himself that at least it isn't "Bride Wars".

FC Naylor

(#FC Naylor on Twitter)

Book available on amazon.com

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THAT....

2011-02-04T01:34:00.000-08:00

Got a leaflet through my door this week, the Tory Party are revving up for the May regional elections. On the cover was a photo of Helena Bonham Carter (so convincing in "Planet of the Apes") in a shooting party with the PM. She is also in the cinema playing an improbably nice Elizabeth Bowes Lyon - more famous as the beer-swilling six hundred year old Queen Mum she grew up to be.

I did a bit of research (i.e. read one newspaper) and discovered a whole cast of luvvies lending their support to the Conservatives despite their taking to arts funding like Sweeney Todd to a larynx - from Matt Willis (so convincing with a crocodile penis in his mouth)to Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George. Not so surprising given that Emin's first sponsor was advertising's evil genius Charles Saatchi and the boys were once responsible for a portrait entiled "Paki." Multi-millionaire tax-avoider, Michael Caine (so convincing as "Michael Caine"... but never as any one else) is of course still a supporter as is Joan Collins (so convinicng as "The Bitch").

Conservatives don't understand the State's role in the arts, the stuff that they like they can subsidize with their private millions, like Tory peer, Lord Sainsbury did with the National Gallery, the rest can fuck off. But artists are not driven by the profit motive but by creative impulses, and focus on quality of experience not on revenue streams. And some of their most enthusiastic "customers" in museums, galleries and theatres are children happy to hand over some midget gems and Fizz Wiz Cola Popping Candy but not much else.

I shall however raise a glass to one billionaire benefactor: Roman Abramovich who
has just (indirectly) handed over £35million to Newcastle Football Club and (directly) £21 million to Sport Lisboa e Benfica. The North East's and Portugal's notoriously wounded economies will be celebrating the generous investment.

FC Naylor

(Twitter @FCNaylor)

Book: "Dead Man Talking- Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" available on amazon.com

I AM NOT NOSTRADAMUS

2011-01-28T00:23:00.000-08:00

I returned from Londis yesterday with only 60% of the items I intended to purchase, plus a weekly gossip magazine containing a photo of an Oscar-nominated actress in a London restaurant (perhaps the text, which I confess to have disregarded, was a speculation as to the purpose of her being there, given that none of them eat)and an article about a woman who breastfeeds her father to stall his cancer - which I have no recollection buying. Such proof that the winds and waves of age have eroded the increasingly porous scarp of my memory, forced me to investigate if my erstwhile powers of political prognostication have dwindled too.

The results are not good.

With conviction I predicted that as soon as the Tory-led Coallition implemented its cuts and raised VAT the UK economy would start to contract. I was wrong. The UK economy has already contracted. Yes, George Osborne's financial Muti is so potent he doesn't have to actually touch the economy, he only has to approach it and it twists out of shape like Yuri Geller's spoons. (Still, I am in good company, Marx predicted revolution for Germany not Russia and China. In fact Berlin's Spartacist movement failed to garner much popular support among fellow Germans, probably because their leader was called "Luxemburg" thereby repelling the natural nationalism in the country. Consequently "Spartacist" is now associated more with a chain of gay saunas than German communists - not that they are mutually exclusive).

I also did not see coming the departure of Andrew Coulson under a cloud of shame and suspicion that he has previously been engaged in dodgy journalistic practices and told lies. As Director of Communications for the Prime Minister that sounds less like an accusation, more like a job description.

But I am most disappointed at a different failure to foresee... I knew "The bigger the society, the smaller the state" was the mantra of the Oxford University Conservative brains trust after a hearty feast of Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, partridge, port and prostitutes but I never anticipated the governemnt would sell off all of Britain's trees! The Royal Mail, and water cannons to China's Xinjiang Province Task Force (I'm sure its merely to irrigate the Taklamakan Desert).. of course. But not all of the land owned by the Forestry Commission!

But obviously the state's money-draining mismanagement of our forests complete with the prehistoric them-and-us industrial relations militancy of the tree Unions can go on no longer. If it's not working-to-rule in the Forest of Dean, its the Deciduous trees of the New Forest refusing to do overtime and effectively taking the whole winter off; or the Ashdown Forest literally walking out, like Ents from Lord of the Rings. Still, what an opportunity for the local forest dwellers to come together as a community to buy and own the trees themselves. The Dryads, the fauns, the pixies under the toadstools, that hermit who tattoos himself like a leopard, Tarzan, Swampy (if he doesn't turn out to be a promiscuous Detective Constable in disguise) the sinister old lady in the gingerbread house and the annual murder victim found by dogwalkers in the undergrowth... can now club together to borrow from a bank, who are after all falling over themselves making loans these days, and buy a thousand hectares of conifers!

I say why only sell the ground under people's feet in the countryside? Do it in the city too. Privatize the pavements. Then all the Big Issue sellers, hot chestnut men, barrow boys, charity collectors (direct debit contracts only, no pesky cash), carol singers, bloke holding the giant sign with "Golf Sale" and an arrow on it, smack addict who sleeps in the doorway of Rymans, West African evangelist with a megaphone, and body with a chalk line drawn round it can form a Big Society consortium, collect all the kerbstones and build a third runway for Heathrow Airport, handy for the next time it snows.

Any spare paving stones can be stored in the nations' now empty libraries along with the forests' logs.

Off to return that magazine and buy some Spam.

FC Naylor

(On Twitter @FCNaylor)
(Book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" available at amazon.com)

TEST THE WEEK

2011-01-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

Pavla brought over some school work that her 14 year old stepchild Iphigenia has to do on the ethics of civil disobedience. I was initially heartened by such a progressive educational project from such a reactionary private school. (I recently petitioned the Council to demolish her school and replace it with a multi-faith cultural centre like the one near Ground Zero thereby prompting a phone call from the National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism. But when I insisted he open an enquiry into the role of the Home Secretary in the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, he quickly got bored and hung up. My masterplan is to have a cineplex, bowling alley, car park and "Frankie and Benny's" on the playing fields of Eton.)

Interesting topic, I thought, until I found out it was not for GCSE but a punishment for bunking off to attend a “Stop Tuition Fees” rally. (Which later turned out to be just a cover for Iphigenia going to Camden Market to get her belly button pierced).

Like a lot of school work these days is was not in the form of an essay but a questionnaire such as:

Q1. When do the ends justify the means?
Q2. Can damage to property ever be worse than injury to a person?
Q3. Is it always wrong to break the law in a democracy?

So far, Iffy’s answers are 1.The In-Betweeners 2. Rihanna 3. Bubble Ball

Hence my participation. I scribbled some nonsense quoting Rawls and Bakhunin then decided if major socio-political issues can be reduced into a Q & A along the lines of Jackie’s “Are you a good kisser or just wet?” so can my look at the week.

Q1- The UK’s Health and Fertilisation Authority are asking the public the following:
is it okay for a mother to donate an egg to an infertile daughter in order for her to conceive a child... whose biological mother would then also be her grandmother?

A1- No.

Q2- Is former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith evil for sanctioning the rendition of British residents with joint Bangladeshi and UK citizenship to Bangladesh to be interrogated knowing they would subsequently be violently tortured?

A2 - Yes, she is.

Q3 - More evil than her husband who claimed MP expenses to pay for porn he rented off their cable TV?

A3 - Yes, more than him.

Q4 - More evil than Tessa Jowell’s husband who took a bribe from Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi to help him fiddle his taxes and then lie about it in court?

A4 - About the same.

Q5 -Talking of evil, is it wrong for ITV to exploit the murdered and molested young victims of Fred and Rose West by selling advertising space in their upcoming television dramatisation.

A5- Yes it is. (But not as wrong as hiring handsome, sexy Dominic West to play ugly hairy Fred West purely on the basis that they share the same surname. Unless you want Benedict Cumberbatch sacked from "Sherlock" so that he can be played by Eamonn Holmes; Julius Caesar to be played by Gus Caesar; and General Robert E Lee by Lisa-Scott Lee.

Q6 - Is Darren Bent, who leaves Sunderland having scored 32 goals from 58 games with a transfer fee profit of £8million to go to Aston Villa a football mercenary?

A6- No.

Q7 - Is Annette Jodie Watkins who left Superdrug for Boots because the pay and promotion prospects were better a Retail Chemist Mercenary?

A7 – Yes. I know Annette came to us from Lloyds Pharmacy’s academy but the customers took her into their hearts and to leave a job to get a better one is simply disgusting. I say we tweet her into suicide and set fire to her bicycle!

Q8 - Is it wrong for a private limited company run by the Association of Chief Police Officers to hire an undercover policeman to infiltrate peaceful environmental protest groups and shag every vegetarian tree hugger he can get his Goth-tattooed hands on justified as being in the national interest because all those white dreadlocks, Celtic rock- folk fusion and generally shouting very loudly could endanger the ears of Heathrow runway workers had the airplane noise not already afflicted them with chronic tinitis?

A8 - Yes.

Q9 - Would it not be right to place an undercover policeman in the Cabinet Office disguised as a civil servant so he can report on the contents of the notes sent privately by Tony Blair to George Bush in the run up to the invasion of Iraq as requested by the Chilcott Inquiry Panel but refused by Gus O’Donnell at Blair’s insistence because they would incriminate him as a liar and war criminal?

A9 - Erm, technically, police officers already are civil servants.

Q10 – Is Dame Patsy Palmer, whose acting credits include Eastenders and Eastenders, right to join Samantha Womack in threatening to quit over a fictional storyline about a fake baby in made up Walford?

A10 – No. She’s a twat. They are all twats.

OMG now Im talking like a 14 year old 2

FC Naylor

(Follow FC on Twitter #FCNaylor)

Email luke.sorba@virginmedia.com to buy the book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor)

WINTER SUN

2011-01-15T02:20:00.000-08:00

No blog until next week. I finally accepted my son's offer of a paid holiday abroad (see Blog of November 7th 2010) to avoid Britain's cold spell, the British complaining about the cold spell, the Cuts, Katie Price's marriage coming to an end, Roy Hodgson's managerial tenure coming to an end, blah blah blah. Thank goodness I turned down two weeks on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef as too, well, too Australian.

Instead I chose to spend a week on a sleepy beach in the southern Mediterranean...and now Tunisia has gone and had a revolution!

Back next week unless I get made Minister for Culture or do a John Reed and spend the year here with Diane Keaton.

FC Naylor

Follow @FCNaylor on Twitter

Book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" is now available. Email luke.sorba@virginnmedia.com for details.

"The acting of a dreadful thing... is a hideous dream"

2011-01-04T15:56:00.000-08:00

Pavla's eldest step-child is interested in becoming an actress and has been to visit me, of all people, for advice. In the Seventies when I started out the only way a playwright could get near an actress was to write a strong feminist lead, insert an explicit nude scene and wait for Helen Mirren or Jenny Runacre to get cast. Nevertheless I consented to give young Saffron or Jasmin or Nutmeg or whatever her name is the benefit of my wisdom in the same way old fossils can still teach young palaeontologist new things.

So I told her, Television and Theatre are full of two things: deeply sexist male actors moaning on about how actresses are all mad... and actresses who are all mad.

Should you however, like Lot's wife or Eurydice's husband choose to scorn all admonitions, well, be careful what you wish for.

For no one is currently suffering more than actress Samantha Womack, a victim of ongoing psychological torture, who has in the words of her tear-stained Tabloid confession, been "driven to the edge of a breakdown" by that serial bully, the BBC Drama Dept. "Those callous bosses at the Beeb have put me through the ringer" the trembling thespian explained, "first they made me a TV star with the sitcom Game On in the Nineties, then when nobody could even remember my name - mainly because I changed it,I used to be called Janus, after the two-faced God - they blinking gone and made me a star a second time on Eastenders. What with the 17 million viewers and being on the front pages of the newspapers every day for a week my poor agent is forever having to get up and answer the phone while working out percentages in his head as the offers of work pour in like a landslide in Kashmir. All because they forced me to do this flipping cot-death storyline which is really upsetting and harsh... Believe me I would gladly give up up half my royalties on my 1991 Eurovision Song Contest hit "A Message to Your Heart" and be shot in the face five times like that American Congresswoman in Arizona rather than play one more scene with a fake dead baby in made-up Walford"

And sad Samantha, as I warned Juniper or Elderberry or Gladioli, is not the only victim of cruel exploitation by an industry that took a drunken teenage junkie and made her respected, stable and financially independent. Look at what old Ralph Fiennes has had to put up with. He recently tweeted "that bastard Spielberg forced me to play a Nazi who, like, kills Jews and stuff in a Concentration Camp. Before, I was very happy as the unknown younger brother of Ranulph Fiennes famous for walking 5000 miles across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean while holding his breath, and skiing to the moon. Now my life is ruined with Oscars and shit. And if you think dead babies are upsetting, imagine what it's like having to play Voldemort and make children scared. I'm seriously considering getting a real job."

I then asked Lily / Fuschia / Hyacinth / St John's Wort / Aaron's Beard, "So, are you sure you want this life? For this is as it ever was!"

And I showed Candida / Salmonella / Marburg Haemorrhagic Fever, Will Kemp's scrawling in the margin of a First Folio I once nicked fron the Bodleian Library. "Will Shakespeare has gone too far and is forcing me to play this bloke Titus Andronicus who gets a mum to eat her own kids in a pie before he kills her. So I'm leaving to see if I can get a part in Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi".

But Amber / Jade / Boron Nitrate had stopped listening. She had spotted from my notes that Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway. This made her cry because she thought Hathaway was dating romcom "Love and Other Drugs" co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal in real life.

The getting of wisdom is a painful disillusion.

FC Naylor

(On Twitter @FCNaylor)

Book "Dead Man Talking - famous last words of FC Naylor" available now. Email luke.sorba@virginmedia.com

FC NAYLOR'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

2010-12-31T06:13:00.000-08:00

My Person of The Year is neither Liu Xiaobo nor Julian Assange but the much ignored (except by the US military) fellow who actually leaked those thousands and thousands of dirty little government secrets in order to make freedom of information a reality - at the cost of his own freedom: BRADLEY MANNING . He faces up to 52 years in jail and is already suffering physical and mental ill health due to extended periods of solitary confinement and psychological harrassment. Lobby Amnesty International to have him declared officially a Prisoner of Conscience.

It was a close-run thing. He just pipped GAVIN HENSON into second place for his ne plus ultra abdominal muscles in Strictly Come Where's My Old Service Revolver I Think I Want To Shoot Myself, closely followed by ANN WIDDECOMBE whom I hear stepped effortlessly out of the same studio and straight into the pack of the Leicester Tigers with whom she now dominates the Heineken Cup from her position at tighthead. Number four is fellow sporting role model KEVIN PIETERSEN for his hatchet-burying, magnanimity and grace in victory. Quickly followed by my favourite Muse, SARCASTICA who has served me so well over this year and in this very paragraph.

Team of the Year is shared by the BELORUSIAN INTERIOR MINISTRY SECURITY DEPARTMENT for their recent world record in "Number of Defeated Presidential Candidates Beaten and Detained in a 24 hour period"; and EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER PLAYED CRICKET FOR PAKISTAN for miraculously guessing and successfully placing a bet on the exact right number. (They also receive the OJ Simpson/FIFA Executive Committee Evidence-Schmevidence Award to be presented by the 2010 Forensic Investigators of Truth of the Year Winners, Doctor Gillian McKeith and Derek Acorah).

Have to lie down now. Celebrating New Year with Adam. He has promised at midnight tonight the Thames will light up like Colonel Kurtz's garrisoned Cambodian village in Apocalypse Now. The horror, the horror...

Back in 2011,

FC Naylor

(On Twitter @FCNaylor)
The book, "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" is now available from luke.sorba@virginmedia.com

FC NAYLOR'S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

2010-12-23T01:28:00.000-08:00

It is my first Christmas with baby Frances. Well, the first one which I have not spent connected to a life support machine dreaming of the bed bath Joanne Whalley gave Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (see book for details... of my coma, not the bed bath, which you can however see on DVD.) And what better way to spend one's time with a captive audience (apart from waterboarding their friends' email addresses out of them if you are that way inclined) than to tell them a story with an old fashioned Xmas message.

So here it is:

In a land not very far away and not very long ago a family sat down to Christmas dinner. The father was called David, (from the House of David which is a Royal Line and not a department store, that's House of Fraser). The mother was called Nick-ola (with a "k" so as not to be confused with Nicola Horlick who is an allumna of Cheltenham Girls' College and Oxford University, married a toff called Piers, owns an investment fund based in the tax haven of Guernsey but is so consummately greedy that she invested ten million quid with Bernie Madoff but somehow managed to make out she is the modern day Little Match Girl and Martine McCutcheon should play her in a biopic).

This couple had three children at their table. One was very, very fat and his plate was overflowing with food, it was piled as high as Amy Winehouse's hair and wobbled like an Iranian tower block. His brother was very skinny, the portion on his plate as dried up as Amy Winehouse's skin, and was tinier than Philip Green's tax bill. It consisted of a single sausage. The third boy was their guest, a foreign exchange student. On his plate was a single sprout, which he had to bring over from Brussels himself because there were none in the shops on account of the unexpected arrival of Doomsday's harbinger, "snow". (The upper middle classes spend a lot of money going abroad in search of this alien joy, to ski on it. But clearly they don't want it living next door. Some members of the middle classes go abroad in search of a different alien joy called sex tourism but that is another story).

The skinny-as-Lindsay Lohan after a semester's binge on a different type of snow-brother was both famished and aggrieved at the paucity of his share. His parents, David and Nick were not oblivious to their son's lot but reassured him that gravity would inevitably cause some of his corpulent sibling's gravy (after all isn't that where the word "gravity" comes from?) to spill from his plate and trickle into his own. They also insisted that witnessing his brother gorge would "nudge" the skinny brother to... I'm not sure what exactly actually - go back in time and be born into a richer family perhaps?

But the gravy did not come and so the skinny brother was instead nudged to ... turn to the foreign exchange student, tell him to "fuck off back where you come from!" and nick his sprout.

And there the story ends.

"But my family isn't like that!" , I hear Frances' 13-month old mind thinking, "my mummy and daddy give everyone equal portions for dinner and it's the same at the tables of all my friends irrespective of class, race, religion or national culture, in fact it seems to be endemic in the human condition to apportion equally without even thinking about it (unless you have a "diffcult" child who is diabetic or a vegan but that is actually a disguised eating disorder and what they need is not food but help.)"

Such were baby Frances' thoughts. So why are David and Nickola different?

Because if they shared out the over-indulged butterball's caramelised parsnips, pretty soon we would all be told what to think, the Late Review panel would be shot, there would be collective orchards in Kent, we would live in barracks, our women's swimming team would be seven feet tall and have moustaches and the X Factor would be judged by an ugly lesbian secret agent with a poison spike in her shoe and won every year by colliery brass bands playing covers of the Fifth Symphony of Vissarion Shebalin that nobody has heard of - apart from the (now late) reviewers of the Late Review!

Toby and his wife returned fron Midnight Mass as I finished my tale to collect their now sleeping infant.

I sit alone and contemplate penning a rebuttal of the Pope Benedict's Christmas homily to a random Godless world but change my mind, dig out the Radio Times as I don't want to miss the Doctor Who special and then cheer myself no end with a hot toddy... and the Fifth Symphony of Vissarion Shebalin.

FC Naylor

(@FCNaylor on Twitter)

The book, "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" available now.

AND THE WINNERS ARE...

2010-12-17T13:26:00.000-08:00

Spent Saturday in Bluewater, which is to a shop what The Stepford Wives is to a woman - a Dr Moreau splicing of the cosily familiar with the deeply, ineffably wrong. A feeling made even worse by the "You should see Lakeside!", comment thrown away by a passerby with the chilling cheeriness of a First World War sapper in the first stages of shell shock.

I was fulfilling Adam's request to keep him company while he went Christmas shopping. I told him I thought being Jewish gave him a get-out-clause but he insisted Judaism was designed to exempt Jews from pleasures (bacon, a woman's bare head etc) not from duties, and then disappeared into Clintons.

Alone in a packed Mall corridor with a chorus of parental exhortations, truculent offspring, harmonious hymning and the theme from Exodus going round my head I began the first half of my review of the year.

Firstly thank you to all contributors for their suggestions.

Andrews, Flower and Strauss were credible candidates for Sportsperson of the Year until their ongoing achievements against the Australian cricket team were sullied by... no, not our twin batting collapses in the WACA Test, but Shane Warne fornicating with the best looking posh woman in Britain since Virginia Holgate and Annabel Croft bookended an incredulous Emlyn Hughes on A Question of Sport c1987. The awesome darter Phil "The Power" Taylor came close but he has the silliest nickname since the wrestler, Ron "The Truth" Killings and boxer, Mike "The Rapist" Tyson. Instead I have decided to leave that crown on the head of Hope "The Powell" Powell even though she actually became the first football manager to get an adult England team into a major tournamnet final since 1966, last year.

Slogan of the Year: "I agree with Nick." Popular until Nick stopped agreeing with Nick and now as likely to be repeated as "Eugene, fetch me £30 million I want to buy Andriy Shevchenko" and "Nonsense, Pliny, Vesuvius is always doing that..."

Which is why the title Villain of the Year cannot be awarded to Barack Obama for breaking one promise (converting Guantanamo Bay into a down market beach resort, the Pontins of Cuba) because, as sure as a Patriot sticks to a Scud, said honorific is tattooed on the very soul of Nick Clegg for breaking them all. A man whose venality is so complete, had he not existed Aesop would have had to invent him; whose party could have feasted on the carcass of a minority Conservative government limping its way to collapse after successfully reducing the deficit on its own, pissing the entire electorate off while simultaneously setting things up perfectly for the next government to take over and spend...

Could have - but did not. Why?

Well, the cynical will say that, like Ashley Cole to a hairdresser, like Andrew Coulson to a voicemail PIN number, Nick could not resist the temptation... to finally take a seat next to the Prime Minister in the limousine of government. Only to find himself with his penis in the exhaust pipe.

But the more charitable interpretation is that Nick has nobly sacrificed personal popularity in order to realise the historic dream of the Liberal Party - the introduction of Proportional Representation, the long delayed Rapture of true democracy finally blessing this great nation of ours. After all, the words "I cannot wait for a single transferable vote in a multi-seat constituency using the d'Hondt counting formula or even better the additional member system using closed party regional lists!" seldom leave the lips of the disenfranchised queueing alongside me at the "5 Items or Less" counter in Lidl. And P.R. is so successful in Belgium that it is now splitting into two countires, and in Israel that it won't acknowledge the country next door.

You stupid, stupid man.

Which means by corollary Politician of the Year must go to fellow LibDem David Laws, as heterosexual as Hugh Hefner, but who concocted a breathtakingly thorough Jason Bourne-like fictional identity as a closeted gay man just so as not to have to endure a second week in the Coalition Cabinet. Sincere congratulations, whomever you choose to mate with.

And finally Own Goal of the Year. I have nothing but respect for brave and honest coppers but as for the Metroplitan Police Force's Territorial Support Group... Well, it is one thing to kill a homeless newspaper vendor or punch an eco-feminist in the face like you did last year, but to kettle, baton and stampede students! Don't you realise these super confident politically active school children are the Home Office Ministers, Police Complaints Authority Chairmen and elected Mayors of the next generation? Good luck with your requests for budget expansion, soft-landing reforms, retirement knighthoods and keeping embarrassing Inquiries behind closed doors come 2030.

And Happy Xmas

F(ather) C(hristmas) Naylor

(on Twitter @FCNaylor)

Book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" now available. lukesorba@ntlworld.com for details.

THE REGRETS START NOW...

2010-12-13T00:28:00.000-08:00

My diffident comrade Pavla has been sent by her husband on a self-development course and Stage One requires her to "take a personal inventory" - which sounds like the course is being run by ex-members of the Audit Commission. I'd been wondering where all the redundant ex-Quangites would take their skills to. Maybe British Nuclear Fuels Ltd and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Advisory Body will take over some brownfield site (Sunderland?) and set up an adventure playground, as part of Cameron's Big Toxic Society project.

(Now, I mourn the loss of services more than Shane Warne does his hair, and Daybreak its ratings but will anyone really miss the Department for Communities and Local Government Advisory Panel on Standards for the Planning Inspectorate - you mean we have people who do the planning, people who inspect the people who do the planning, and people who advise on standards for the people who inspect the people who do the planning? But no mention of the people who actually carry out the plans...)

Seeing as an inventory of what I have on my person amounts to : an out-of-date £20 note I really must take to the bank; a pocketful of sugar powder left over from a quarter of aniseed twists I bought from the Pick & Mix the day Woolworths went tits up; and a prostitute's card from a phone box I once used to jot down the number plate of a car than ran over my foot, I did not join Pavla in her spiritual and material stock check. I would rather sit back and take stock of others.

So in anticipation of next week's "FC Naylor reviews the year" I am inviting nominations for "Anything" of the Year: Man, Woman, Team, Wedding, Bankruptcy, Earthquake, Coup, whatever...

To start you off:
Businessman of the Year - Ken Bates. Bought Leeds Utd AFC, borrowed gazillions to improve it, declared insolvency to avoid paying the gazillions back, then bought the club back for tuppence and now it is approaching the Premiership!

Not Businessmen of the Year - The Finance Ministers of Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Portugal who tried the exact same trick, whose national economies are now approaching the Ryman League Division One South, slightly wealthier than Dulwich Hamlet who currently lie 15th, but not as wealthy as Dog Kennel Hill Sainsbury's, next door.

All suggestions considered and evaluated in next blog.

FC Naylor (can now be followed on Twitter @FCNaylor)

A perfect Xmas present would be a carbon-neutral, zero side-effect, no refrigeration required, vaccine to chloroquine-resistant malaria... but excepting that, you could buy the book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" from amazon.com or by emailing lukesorba@ntlworld.com

STICKS AND STONES

2010-12-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

Tough month for the Australians: we beat them at rugby, we beat them at cricket and now we have locked up one of their top two publishers... and not the evil one. WikiLeaks's editor, Julian Assange awaits extradition on rape charges - despite the complainants admitting sex was consensual and free of violence or threat - but his real punishment must be having had his PayPal account frozen. Imagine not being able to go on eBay?! Where now is Julian going to find tickets for Glee Live! at the O2 Arena, a Die-Cast Corgi Model James Bond Aston Martin DB5 or an American college girl's virginity?

The subject of press freedom came up with my ex-wife Cressida. She used to own The Commentator newspaper - see my book for the full story - and I saw her this week at our granddaughter Frances' first birthday party. (I shall never forget her little scorched face after several bootless attempts to extinguish that single candle's flame, puffing like some enervated Rapahel cherub at the gates of hell.) American politicians really do want Assange executed on account of WikiLeaks. I can't complain, I want Richard Desmond executed for the Daily Express, Ok! and Channel 5.

Talking of newspapers. Pakistan's second largest, the Nawa-i-Waqt has called for Christian mother of five, Aasia Bibi to be beheaded after her Muslim neighbours claimed that during a row over a glass of water, Ms Bibi insulted the prophet Mohammed. Even though they won't say what Ms Bibi actually said - presumably so they don't get beheaded too

I had hoped Cressida, as a former media magnate, might have an opinion but she was fully occupied soothing Frances' burnished cheek with cooing vowels and Sudocrem.

Turning to her husband Alistair, (formerly editor-in-chief of Cressy's paper but now working on a revisionist biography of fellow Greyfriars Edinburgh parishoner, William McGonagall entitled "Poet, Prophet, Patriot" on account of his many ditties detailing British military victories abroad) I attempted to extract an opinion from him about the weekend's vote-rigging scandal.

"Oh, Cher Lloyd won fair and square." the ex-newsman protested. "Besides, have you seen how much weight Mary Byrne has put on."

I had actually been referring to Cote d'Ivoire's President Gbabgo snatching election "victory" over opposition leader Alassane Ouattara but was too distracted to follow this up once Cressy and my daughter-in-law Mary began to sanitise the living room sufficiently to baffle CSI Miami as to how Frances singed her gills let alone Kensington and Chelsea's social services department.

Consequently I was left unsure whether to praise the press or punish them... until the next morning when broadcast legend James Naughtie gloriously used the word "cunt" on the Today programme (and not at Sarah Montague but in spoonerized reference to the Secretary of State for Culture, - Jeremy Hunt.)

Julian, Aasia, James: rest assured it remains my duty, as Voltaire made it so, that even should I "disapprove of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it".

FC Naylor

PS Baby Frances has fully recovered.

PPS The book, "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" is stil available from cringing, betrayers of free speech and US government lackeys, Amazon.com as well my personal amanuensis. Email lukesorba@ntlworld.com for details.

NO NEWS IS BIG NEWS

2010-11-29T07:26:00.000-08:00

The simple process of ekeing out a few miserly words about my week was jeopardised by the remarkable coincidence of my moniker, "FC Naylor - Incapacity Benefit Claimant" turning out to be Pashto for "High-ranking Taliban official available as intermediary between Quetta Shura and ISAF leadership". Consequently I got myself renditioned by MI6 to a five star hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva complete with free mini-bar, hot tub and twin Russian escort girls. (I got rumbled when I proposed turning the entire country into an opium field and sharing the profits, after watching that Rhys Ifans movie about Howard Marks on the hotel Pay Per View.

If only...

And if only that was the greater scandal exposed this week about the West's top Intelligence services who managed to confuse notorious warlord Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansourthe with... the bloke behind the counter at Londis in Kandahar. On account of them both being foreign and "a bit beardy". Unimpressed by identification claims as reliable as a Hoxton Estate Agent's I asked Mary (who is a US citizen) to use Freedom of Information legislation and check the rumour the CIA are about to confirm officially that Beyonce Knowles is indeed, as she insists, Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanoff, and that Gareth Barry is a world class holding midfielder.

Unfortunately she was unsuccessful since Wikileaks', well, er "leaks" I suppose, have demoralized US intelligence staff so badly they were all out having their confidence rebult by motivational hypnotist, Paul McKenna author of best sellers: "I can make you buy this shit book!" and "I can make you buy this even shittier book too!"

But as I was saying to Adam who is off to the Israeli Embassy to implore the IDF not to start WW3, not every leak is that much of a surprise:

1. The King of (non-nuclear) Saudi Arabia desiring that the Americans would bomb regional rival Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Reactor is NOT news...The King of Saudi Arabia desiring that the US bomb the Welcome Break service station at Charnock Richards, that would be NEWS. (Even though the prices are outrageous)

2. Italian Gangster-Dictator, Silvio Berlusconi being very close to Russian Gangster-Dictator, Vladimir Putin is NOT news... Vladimir Putin regularly goes Ten Pin Bowling with Billy Bragg, Gilbert & George and Camille Paglia while Silvio Berlusconi swaps sex tweets with retired British wrestling legend, Cyanide Sid Cooper. That's NEWS.

3. Prince Andrew slags off foreigners and journalists at ex-pats' business lunch is NOT news... Prince Andrew demonstrates conclusively that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. That's NEWS. (Anyone know what Fermatt's Earlier Theorems are?)

4. US State Department intelligence staff monitor emails of UN Secretary General, NOT news. If the US State Department hacked into Kimberley Walsh off Girls Aloud's online account at Zara... nah, that wouldn't be news either.

5 And German Chancellor Angela Merkel found to be "risk averse and not very creative" hmm, maybe that is why she is in Germany's Conservative party as opposed to the "Anarcho-Situationists' Blindfold Base-Jumpers'Party". Besides, the last time Germany had a leader who thought outside the box, his blue-sky thinking's bold vision was of a world without Jews, Gipsies, Homosexuals, Communists, Slavs and the Disabled in it (i.e everybody I am on first name terms with) So, NOT news. Angela Merkel fires ping pong balls from vagina at Cancun Summit, that's NEWS. Berlusconi subsequently invites her to Sardinian orgy, again NOT news.

6 FC Naylor uses sledgehammer to crack nut, NOT news either. But I love it.

Off to stop Adam being kettled in Palace Green.

The book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" now available, with reviews, on Amazon.com OR email lukesorba@ntlworld.com

IT'S BEHIND YOU!

2010-11-23T00:18:00.001-08:00

Pavla was trembling with such morbid abandon last night she makes Gillian McKeith look like the sentry outside Buckingham Palace. She - and half the world - is convinced the death of two soldiers on Yeonpyeong Island yesterday is going to precipitate global conflagration. Granted it doesn't help that the World's media editors are ringed around the two Koreas chanting "fight, fight, fight, fight, fight...". On the other hand the same people seem preternaturally blase that two giant nuclear enemies, Pakistan and India have been shooting at each other across the Siachen Glacier for the past 26 years. Not enough yellow there, to be enough peril? Plus the DPRK has as much chance of overrunning and occupying its southern neighbour as a gipsy caravan has Los Angeles.(If a movie called "Alien versus Romany" ever gets greenlit, you heard it here first.)

I then further assuaged Pavla's fear by pointing out how nuclear disarmament has in fact moved a step closer with the news that Trident might be cancelled! Until I discovered it is the wrong Trident!

Not since 1968 when Robert McCulloch mail-ordered the wrong London Bridge to Arizona has there been a worse case of mistaken identity. (Unless you count the 1983 police shooting of film editor Stephen Waldorf while parked in his Mini, on account of his sharing with escaped villain, David Martin "similar bouffant hair". (It's a miracle Simon LeBon made it through the decade alive).

Unfortunately it is not the Trident Missile Programme conceived during the Cold War to deter the USSR from invading Europe in a pincer movement via Afghanistan (yes, really) and consisting of 200 nuclear warheads sufficient to render an entire planet lifeless (ours) that might be scrapped; rather Operation Trident, the expert multi-racial Police unit designed to save a generation of young black Inner City males from prison or the graveyard.

Still, Pavla's apocalyptophobia (nothing to do with anti-semitic drunkard Mel Gibson's film) was nevertheless still abating. Until I mentioned that if she wanted to unmask the real Babylonian Whore presaging Armageddon, she should seek the Beast not in the East as scripture says, but the West.

Namely, Ireland (a country you could probably buy the freehold on for the price of a single warhead) where the governors of our nations are handing over their people's money to those fallen angels of Capitalism, the Banks. At the same time sacrificing jobs and services to appease their god, Market with a mixture of faith and panic to match that of Skull Islanders feeding virgins to King Kong.

The engine of capitalism is profit, I exhorted in a voice disturbingly like Ian Paisley (whose Doctorate is exceeded only by McKeith's in academic prestige). Profit needs growth, growth needs investment, investment needs credit...

By this point however, Pavla was on her knees praying through tears of terror and I only managed to save the day by passing on the good news about Pope Benedict's revised position on safe sex and fetched her some condoms gathering dust in the bathroom. Unfortunately she rather got the wrong idea, reminded me she was married said she thought of me as a friend and fled.

She did however, in her haste, leave behind her shopping. So I would like officially to thank President Kim Jong-il, the Vatican and The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for last night's dinner.

FC Naylor

The book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" now available. Please email lukesorba@ntlworld.com for details.

REJOICE

2010-11-18T15:14:00.000-08:00

Short blog this week for two reasons:

1. Did bugger all.

2. Mary brought bed bugs back from New York so the flat is being fumigated.

Consequently I've been feeling sorry for myself and eating cereal. As an antidote to my malaise I shall concentrate exclusively on two pieces of good news.

Prince William is getting married! And because he is afflicted by the same mutant aristocratic gene that produced Uncle Edward's and Grandpa Philip's prematurely glabrous crowns he has wisely decided to invite Kate Middleton, with her bountiful Flight Attendant hair, to join the bloodline. However because daddy (also follically defficient) Charles continues to occupy Clarence House and Highgrove - on account of the Queen being harder to prise from Buckingham Palace than a prognosis from an Oncologist - the couple have no suitable accomodation to share. Therefore I am demanding they be allowed to live on the aircraft carrier, Ark Royal. It already belongs to the State, is about to be mothballed and has "royal" in its name. An alternative would be the Royal Bethlem Hospital... were it not already occupied by the mentally ill and located in Beckenham, which is far too snobby to accept the daughter of a party paraphernalia mail order magnate.

Going further down the social scale, hoorah for Chile's Los 33! Hollywood has announced there will be a movie made about their being buried alive in the notorious San Jose mine. To be produced by Brad Pitt! Coincidence? Or will this be the first of a spate of true life stories to be filmed by stars with relevant names? The Chandlers' abduction ordeal on that Somali pirate ship to be produced by Angelina Jolie(Roger). A film about traffic wardens starring
Ralph Fiennes? China's Lake Tai infestation by algae starring Orlando Bloom?

I'm sure there are funnier examples but I am both very tired and down to the flipping cornflakes in my Variety Pack. But please do join in FC's Film Fantasies and send in your own suggestions.

Shit... the milk's off!

The new book, "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" is now available. For details, email lukesorba@ntlworld.com

GO EAST, YOUNG MAN

2010-11-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

My son Toby is offering to pay for me to go abroad this Christmas - either so his Oxford chum in MI5 can bug my flat in Camberwell or because I spent last Christmas in a coma (Read the book to find out why). At first I feigned pride and demurred but in reality I can't think of many countries where in conscience I would want to spend (albeit his) money.

Italy has been contaminated. First by Trudie Styler, the Marie Antoinette of Wiltshire who also owns a fiefdom in Tuscany (where she keeps bees prisoner to provide honey for Harrods); and second by that priapic Tiberius of Milan, Silvio Berlusconi (for whom Marie Antoinette would have been too old). It should be impossible to execrate the founder of a party called "The Freedom People" but seeing as "freedom" appears to be defined as "keeping a Prime Minister guilty of tax evasion, perjury, bribing judges, racketeering, corporate fraud, procuring under age prostitutes and wearing hair plugs even Nicholas Cage would consider vulgar... out of jail", it is not.

So I shall eschew sojourning in Italy, and lobby the Tomorrow People, Pan's People, The Shiny Happy People, even the Sunday People to stand against Il Popolo della Liberta.

And while on the subject of euphemistic political soubriquets:

(i)Have you ever met a contemporary US patriot who has held a Tea Party. I am unaware of any American drinking the stuff except perhaps Truman Capote or Niles and Frasier Crane. In terms of semantic incongruity it must rank with the Burmese military junta's self-appelation as the "State Peace and Development Council". Congratulations on your victory in this week's election by the way, Generals, even though its outcome was literally the only contest on which I could not get odds from my Lahore bookmaker.

And (ii) should Britain's Joint Forces Interrogation Team in Iraq ever offer to "condition" you, be aware they are promising to death-threaten, stress-position, sleep-deprive, strip naked, manacle, hood and beat you... not to moisturize your hair.

The above admission which makes even "staycationing" morally questionable too. So I was sorely tempted to book two weeks in the Orient; especially after our top level delegation's persuasive lecturing of the People's Republic of China on their hitherto less than exemplary record on human rights, yesterday.

Although David Cameron's matronly chiding might have been more persuasive had he not insisted, despite diplomatic warnings, on wearing a bright red poppy at the same time. For in China the poppy is not a symbol of gallant sacrifice but of the Opium Wars. Just as the swastika is an ancient sanskrit symbol sacred to the Hindu religion... you still wouldn't expect to see President Patil of India wearing it on her arm on a state visit to Golders Green.

Now, having flagged up the two brutal military campaigns Britain fought to impose the opium trade against local opposition, I fully expect to see our PM displaying a poppy on his next "hearts and minds" tour of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, along with a pet pig and the Pirelli calendar. Meanwhile George Osborne can continue the peace offensive in Beijing with a copy of "Devil Doctor: the Return of Fu Manchu" under his arm while Michael Gove stretches the corners of his eyes and smirks "Oi Wen Jiabao, say 'Red Lorry Yellow Lorry' very fast!" And Vince Cable asks Hu Jintao if he knows Jackie Chan.

And finally, said Vince Cable has just referred News Corporation's proposed take- over of BskyB to Ofcom, under competition rules. To whom can he refer his own government's merger of The Office of Fair Trading with The Competition Commission?

Suggestions on where I should take my Christmas holiday, most welcome.

To enquire about purchasing a limited edition, signed copy of the book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" email lukesorba@ntlworld.com

Mohammed Al-Subtext meets Oliver Elephant-Intheroom

2010-11-03T04:26:00.000-07:00

Long ago, I took advantage of my wife's opiate befuddlement to register our baby son as "Che Vladimir Danton Naylor-Parnell" (No drugs were used at his delivery but keep in mind I did meet his mother at a "happening" in Syd Barrett's house in the Sixties) so baby names are a serious issue for me.

Especially since the question of "Who came first in the 2009 survey of names for new-born boys: Mohammed or Oliver?" is as impossible to answer definitively as "Who came first in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida: Gore or Bush?". (Coincidentally, only today George W boasted that he considered dropping Dick Cheney as VP before the 2004 election "to show who was in charge"...but subsequently didn't. Thereby showing who was in charge.)

The latter's answer pivots on one's interpretation of a tiny fragment of ballot paper known as a "Chad" (Coincidentally, it came 74th on the boys' names list, after "Cody" but before "Troy").

The former's answer pivots on the case for and against counting variant spellings of the aforementioned traditional Muslim name, such as "Muhammad" and of that traditional English name, such as "Olly" (but not Oladele, Olufemi, Olumide etc as these are traditional Nigerian names.)

And the answer is... I don't care. Partly because my fetish is for high heels and corsets and not statistics. But mainly because the real question on people's minds but not on their lips, (in the same way that no one will say out loud "I'm sorry I know we have met before but I have no recollection of your name please can you remind me?" or "I like looking at pictures of Linsey Dawn McKenzie... especially in high heels and a corset") is:

"In Britain, families originating from (predominantly Muslim) North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have, on average, a higher birthrate than indigenous families: what do we think about this?"

Insecure liberals respond "It's not true!" (Even though it is.)
Hysterical conservatives respond "They're taking over!" (Even though "they" are not.)

My response is that this is a perfectly legitimate agenda item for the Plenary session at the Annual Conference of Demographers, Town Planners and Social Policy Advisers, after which they can get drunk on Magners, dance to "Love Shack" by The B-52's and then get off with each other in the Holiday Inn.

What I could also say is that Ulrika Jonsson has four different kids from four different dads and she migrated here from Sweden! But I won't - lest I be attacked with a Tazer by Lisbeth Salander. The survey does however point to a meager display of imagination when it comes to naming Muslim boys. But given that Anglicans, Jonathan Ross and Jamie Oliver between them (with their respective wives I hasten to add) have spawned Poppy Honey, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom Rainbow, Betty Kitten, Harvey Kirby and Honey Kinney, perhaps that is no bad thing. Having made that criticism, yes I admit the glass in my house is looking sufficiently fragile to be shattered by a chad lobbed by a moth.

But now, from Islam in Britain to the Catholic Church in Britain, which has confessed (as they impeach others to do) it will not be able to pay back the £3.5 million it owes the State (for the Papal visit, see earlier blog) until long after it is due. Obviously our indebted government which allegedly needs cash as badly as Satan needs Heavy Metal is compelled to exercise the same fiscal rigour with which it is scaling back the nation's public services to those of a Ryanair noon flight to Guernsey, and must deal with the defaulting Church as follows:

Either (i) Repossess it. I'm sure there is still some lead left on those roofs that Henry VIII missed and the price of scrap is soaring.

Or (ii) Force it into administration, deducting 10 points so it drops down a division and next season has to compete against the likes of Jainism, Baha'is and Wicca.

But lastly some reassurance - the same I gave to Pavla who is flying to Poland to see her nephew debut for Lodz in the Ekstraklasa (which is apparently a football league and not Polish for "detention"): NO BOMBS were found on any cargo planes last week! (Well apart from those charted by Viktor Bout or flying over the Federally Administered Trbal Areas). What was found on its way from Yemen was not a bomb but some Pentaerythritol tetranitrate better known as PETN (not to be confused with PETA which is a group of naked supermodels who throw paint over fur coats.)

Yes, PETN is an explosive substance but one so stable that it cannot even be ignited by direct flame (which is why Richard Reid's deadly weapon on AA Flight 63 was actually a smouldering shoe) and practically requires another (detectable) bomb to set it off which sort of defeats the point and in effect makes it less dangerous than the plane's own fuel tank. So either we import all our runner beans from Kenya in gliders or we just get on with it.

In the meantime I shall leave you, dear readers with an invitation to post who is your favourite Oliver or favourite Mohammed. My vote goes to former ANC President, Oliver Tambo and boxer, poet and activist Muhammad Ali. All spellings allowed.

Keep safe,

F(atima) C(hrist) Naylor

The book, "Dead Man Talking: Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" is now available. Email lukesorba@ntlworld.com for details

THE BOOK I WROTE ABOUT ME IS AVAILABLE NOW

2010-11-01T01:11:00.000-07:00

Not in the shops for a couple of more weeks but twenty discounted preview copies personally signed by my good self are available... in a box on the floor barely inches from where I am sitting. However I am happy to get Pavla to go down the post office and send them to you.

The book is called "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor" and covers my most traumatic year (2009) when I was struck down by VHD and my ex, Cressy, the old stick, gave me a column in her newspaper "The Commentator". And then Pavla discovered something in my flat...

Adam says it is frequently libellous and won't have it in the house (he keeps a copy in his Volvo, which like Sark apparently has its own laws albeit with a foreign policy controlled by HMG). It is like Lady Chatterley's Lover without the sex, not set in Nottinghamshire and about me rather than a gardener. So buy it now before it gets pulped.

Enquiries can be sent to lukesorba@ntlworld.com. Enquiries about the book, that is, not other stuff as he thinks he knows loads but actually knows bugger all.

I'm off to track down Kirsty Wark now so I can be on the Review Show. I think she's yummy.

TIME FOR WAR (PLUS WHY TORIES THINK TEACHERS ARE BAD FOR SCHOOLS)

2010-10-27T02:27:00.000-07:00

Mary and Toby are putting Frances' name down on school waiting lists, after all she is ten... months. So I shared my attitude to private schools: can't live with them; can't turn them into state-owned Renaissance Fair-style theme parks but instead of actors retain the staff and the kids (to be culled when they grow too old like in Logan's Run).

Ever conciliatory, Mary gently suggested investigating one of these new Free Schools. Unfortunately I had witnessed the movement's leader (a very angry woman called Rachel whose child was probably bullied at the local school for being christened Gwilym and whose husband can no longer afford fees after losing his job at Lehman Brothers) broadcast her plan to hire people without training to be teachers. "You don't need to learn how to teach" she claimed. "You don't need to learn at all" her pupils might extrapolate as they all go home after registration, stopping to steal from the Pound Shop on the way, presuming all things now to be as Free as their school.

Clearly "pedagogy" to Rachel is merely that little dial you put in your shoe to count how many miles you walk around Peter Jones on late-closing Thursdays. "Achieving highly in the real world equips you for the classroom better than any formnal training." she continued. No comment..but I look forward to watching the Best Jockey in the World Ever, Lester Piggott teaching English.

I can only assume Rachel's model was Ireland where schools were run not by qualified teachers but by priests. Who subsequently caned and buggered the country into alcoholism and financial bankruptcy (driving geniuses like Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, Joyce and Liam Brady abroad while hanging on to Jim Corr.)

"Or perhaps", I sneered to my now cowering daughter-in-law "they could hire some heroic firemen like the ones who refused to go down those pitch black tunnels to rescue the wounded of 7/7 in case they met a ghost, and took ages getting into the stations in the first place because the signs on the stairs say always keep to the left!"

"Dad, isn't that an example of when training really does get in the way of common sense?" offered Toby. But by now Mary had settled on home schooling and I was further processing the quixotic contemporary relationship between achievement and reward. (Adam is apopleptic that a John Adeleye got thrown out of X Factor.) For instance, "The Emperor of Exmoor" was shot dead by some obese cuckolded businessman not in spite of, but because of being Britain's tallest living land creature. "He was his own worst enemy" claimed a reporter. Does this mean all the nation's vertically-endowed are in danger? Should Peter Crouch, Simon Shaw and Luol Deng stay indoors? Is this a secret war being conducted by the Nibelungen?

Which finally brings me to a most serious issue. Me doing a U-Turn. I am as you know a lifelong opponent of colonial adventurism. Columbus' genocide of the Arawaks on Haiti, Churchill's proposal to use poison gas on "uncivilised tribes", Everton's 2005 foray into the European Champions League - no one comes out of it looking good. But I have been reading both leaked documents and published news recently and have discovered a government mired in corruption, propped up by local Shi'a extremists, the Mahdi Army, in cahoots with West-hating General Soleimani of the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards, that steals foreign aid and presides over wholescale illegal detention, torture and extra-judicial executions involving tens of thousands of people. Yes I fear it may be our moral duty, with or without UN approval... to now invade Iraq.

THE BUDGET, THE BBC, THE SAUDI PRINCE AND HIS LOVER

2010-10-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

My good friend and GP, Dr Adam Gold took me power-walking in Richmond Park this week. The stress of the upcoming NHS reforms have led him to comfort-eat and his wife, Miriam wants him to shed some pounds. When I caught up with him, Tortoise to his Hare (as in Aesop's Fables not as in Burke and Hare - although I still have my suspicions regarding the provenance of some of his Med School's cadavers)I discovered him prone and moaning plaintively "I think I'm having a heart attack, FC, I think I'm having a heart attack!" which is a bit like Roger Federer popping up in my garden to implore "Help, FC, I can't get my first serve in!" or Johnny Depp asking me how to get more women to fancy him.

So I changed the subject.

To take his mind off his Radcliffean surrender I mentioned that at least the NHS aggregate budget is not being reduced, think of the BBC, where the Conservative and Unionist Party / Liberal Democrats Coalition (it's like one of those Rock and Roll Supergroups... but with only drummers) is proposing to

i) stop funding free TV licenses for the over 75's

ii) stop funding the World Service

That's right, George Osborne, the Keith Moon of the Treasury, has decided to target

i) very old, lonely people and

ii) the information-starved global poor

which the Mike Holloway of Fiscal Economics can do, safe in the knowledge his cuts have the endorsement of 35 British Business leaders expressed in an open letter to the Telegraph signed by the likes of the Chairmen of Next and GlaxoSmithKline, each and every one man enough to sacrifice their teenage kids' Education Maintenace Grants despite the impact on their monster tycoon's wages, bonuses, share options and pension treasure, for the sake of the country. This PR gimmick to get the general public onside could not have misfired more had the signatories included Conrad Black, Asil Nadir, Fred the Shred, Hicks and Gillett, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Philip II of Spain, Lex Luthor, the Scorpion Killer and that crazy woman who dropped a cat in the bin.

So, instead of constantly apologizing why doesn't the BBC tell this Cabinet of Jay Osmonds, "We are the world's standard at providing television, radio and online content. You are a bunch of amateur Oxbridge toffs taking a gap decade from business to play at running the country"? After which the BBC could offer a compromise and take off the air the staggering shit that passes for daytime TV and replace it with the Test Card girl holding a sign saying READ A BLOODY BOOK!, or VISIT A FRIEND!, and we could all be happy.

By now Adam had recovered his breath but was still complaining about Lactic Acid in his glutes so I comforted him by asking if he had read about Saudi Prince Abdulaziz, found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey, whose barristers begged the court not to publicize their client's use of male escorts. Because such practice shames his religion and culture I suppose. Now the Qur'an and hadith both contain some dodgy stuff (likewise the Bible) and both extraordinarily consider sodomy a sin, but I cannot find anywhere the Prophet saying "bumming is bad but beating your slave to death is okay!"

I was about to extemporize on which Circles of Hell, Burke and Hare might dwell in when Adam limped home with a stitch, making me swear never to mention his humiliation to anyone.

FC Naylor

PS Rest in Peace, "Mr Cunningham".

FRIENDLY FIRE AND RULING THE WAVES

2010-10-13T01:18:00.000-07:00

My American daughter-in-law, Mary is shunning me and not because I spooned some Guinness into baby Frances (she is teething and I had bought the wrong Calpol). No, because I mocked her enthusiasm for Tea Party advocate and Republican senatorial candidate for Delaware, Christine O'Donnell (who makes Sarah Palin look like Michael Palin) who claims that US geneticists have secretly created "mice with fully functioning human brains". Methinks the lady doth take seriously too much the film, Stuart Little. And I could not disguise my even greater contempt for Ms O'Donnell's support for the NRA for I can find no record of an American householder successfully shooting down an armed intruder but plenty of householders accidentally shooting themselves and / or their kids.

Indeed, I explained to Mary (while simultaneously burping little Frances to see if she regurgitated in the shape of a shamrock) that if I had my way not only would I amend the constitution to ban civilians from bearing arms, I would extend that to the military too. Granted, US armed intervention would now be reduced to literally waving one's arms about but that might be no bad thing.

My late mother-in-law Kitty Clarke served in the ATS in World War Two. (The ATS in 1949 changed its name to the WRAC, not a fleet of sexy female peripatetic car mechanics who start up your flat battery, but the Women's Royal Army Corps. In a perfect world we would have both.) She told me they had a saying when incoming aircraft were spotted overhead "If its the Germans duck. If its the Americans run!" I refer of course to that egregious oxymoron "Friendly fire".

This week's tragic victim is British aid worker, Dr Linda Norgrove who was killed by a grenade thrown by a member of US Special Forces (If that is "special" as in children who are slow at school, then I must question the wisdom of handing a loaded M16 to a trained-to-kill version of Benny from Crossroads.)

As for the earlier official statement that Dr Norgrove was a victim of a suicidal Taliban captor, such mendacity has a long pedigree. In 2004 Pat Tillman (a former NFL star) was shot dead by fellow American Special Forces in Afghanistan. But the original position of the Pentagon was that Tillman was "the victim of an enemy ambush". This was later revised to, "oh, alright then, he was actually killed by friendly fire but in the fog of war caused by an enemy ambush". This was then further revised to "fine, fine, he was killed by friendly fire and yes, there was no enemy ambush but there was an IED that went off causing two allied groups to fire on eachother". But wait! Like a a particularly demented episode of Lost Season 6 there's more! A still further investigation has revised even this to "you win, you win, there was no IED, there was no second Allied group, Tillman was just shot dead" or words to that effect. Personally I think the investigating now needs to stop before this evolves into " Okay I admit it, there was no shooting", "I have never heard of Pat Tillman" and finally "how can I be sure that you don't exist except in my imagination or that we are not both figments of someone else's dream. Or worse still, that I am actually just a mouse with a fully functioning human brain!"

By now Mary had left my flat and was on the way to children's A & E so I directed the rest over the phone to my son, Toby. (He met Mary while selling yachts in Newport Beach, even though he gets seasick on the Log Flume at Alton Towers).

"And an American A-10 fighter during Operation Desert Storm blew up two British Warrior MICVs resulting in nine deaths - thereby causing 20% of all British casualties in the Gulf War in one go. Not good odds for a British squaddie, you might say, but better than those of the US G.I's, 24% of whose fatalities in the Gulf War were caused by fellow Americans. And I haven't even mentioned the US Marines' EA-6B Prowler, whose cowboy pilots took out a bloody cable car in Cavalese, Italy in 1999 killing 20 skiers. Which given Italy's propensity to avoid getting hurt in wars (in 1993 the Commander of the Italian Peacekeeping Force in Somalia sent his troops home saying "we didn't come here to be shot at." So, what did they go there for? Mogadishu's lively House Music scene? The shopping?) is probably the most that country has lost "in action" in 60 years."

At this point Toby interrupted and accused me of being anti-American, adding why didn't I have a go at North Korea? To which I replied I'm not aware of any Friendly Fire incidents involving North Korea. On account of there being no one friendly with North Korea. (Apart from the Middlesborough Ladies' football team). But I am happy to have a go at fellow Brits in the military.

So I will.

In this Age of Cuts why on earth are the Royal Navy getting two giant new aircraft carriers at a cost of £5 billion? On what grounds did the Strategic Defence Review conclude the safety of the realm lies in ruling the waves? Is it because of recent British military success in the Sierra Leonean bush, the Iraqi Desert, land-locked former Yugoslavia (whose Serb population is so bellicose they forced a football match against Italy to be abandoned after attacking.... their own player. Clearly after fighting Croats, Kosovans and Bosnians they have run out of enemies and have turned on each other like starving zombies) and land-locked Afghanistan? Campaigns already being compared by historians to the Battles of Salamis, Trafalgar and Midway.

Oddly, the only action I can remember the Royal Navy seeing in the last twenty five years is:

in 2007 when 15 British sailiors and marines were taken prisoner by the Iranian coast guard without a single shot being fired, plank being walked or mainbrace being spliced; and in 2009 when the Royal Navy ship Wave Knight semaphored cheerio as they gawped at the British couple, Mr and Mrs Chandler being kidnapped by Somali pirates. Apparently they chose not to intervene "in case someone got hurt".

I have seen mermaids pose more threat.

Rule Britannia,

FranCis (Drake) Naylor

FC NAYLOR ACCEPTS THE OUTSTRETCHED HAND OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY... BUT THEN GOES AND SPOILS IT ALL

2010-10-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

Had a row with Adam and Pavla over "X Factor" contestant, Gamu. They want her in the next round, I want her to leave the country. Not just because her mother does not dispute she is not a refugee and has indeed overstayed her student visa, therefore not returning home would be a bit like me being given a ticket to see a film but then when it is over, setting up a permanent family home in Screen 4 of the Greenwich Picturehouse. But because I would love all contestants on that pseudo-talent, pseudo-competition sent into exile regardless of their immigrant status. I always knew the voting was fixed... but I would never have guessed, by the UK Border Agency.

Likewise I don't think applications for residency in the UK should be decided on vocal virtuosity or we would be an island exclusively of Welsh rugby union fans and very fat Italians.

This provoked the arguable retort from Pavla that I was mean and without a heart. Perhaps I am. But from Adam came the far more objectionable accusation that I had "joined the readers of the Daily Mail!": the newspaper whose 1934 front page headline was "Hoorah for the Blackshirts!". Now, I already conform to the stereotype of going balder and deafer with age - but surely I am not becoming more right wing too?

So I put this theory to the test and watched the Conservative Party Conference... and found myself cheering the Prime Minister! And not in an ironic "person you love to hate" way like JR Ewing, Alexis Colby or indeed Sir Alexis Ferguson.

No. I absolutely agree with ending universal benefits such as nursery vouchers and child benefit regardless of the recipients' wealth. After all, who was it that wrote "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs"? Pavla helpfully essayed Jane Austen but no, it was Karl Marx.

I have nothing personal against little Kai Rooney (apart from his stupid name) but I can't see the justification of public money going into Wayne and Coleen's bank account especially if they are only going to spend it on prostitutes and shoes. And I have nothing against little Florence Rose Endellion Cameron (apart from her stupid name) but I think David and Samantha can do without the extra eleven quid a week paid for by the rest of us.

And while we are on the subject, I see only the thinnest of moral evidence for the general public funding a winter fuel allowance for Bernie Ecclestone, the Duke of Edinburgh, Margaret Thatcher or Cilla Black (all of whom I do have much against). For a start it wouldn't heat one of Philip's horse boxes let alone his palace and two castles. And is it really right wing to want to restrict pensioners' free bus passes to well, erm, how about pensioners who use buses? Nobody I know paying the higher tax bracket (e.g. my ex, Cressida) would be seen dead in one. Mainly because it would mean sitting next to someone in the lower tax bracket. I even agree with the Tory teacher who demanded more discipline in schools (although if she thinks that to be soft on children is "left wing" she has obviously never visited a Romanian orphanage).

If ceasing the public subsidy of the middle and upper classes is "right wing", then so far, so right wing.

Except it is not far enough.

Think how much the government would save if it cut the tax breaks given to private schools - Eton (Cameron and Osborne) and Westminster (Clegg) are not charities, tax them! The Church is not a charity either, have you seen how much gets put in the plate in the parishes of Wimbledon, Kingston or Hampstead? (Enough to keep a jobless family of ten in Housing Benefit) Tax the religious institutions.

And Agas. In fact surtax all rangeware. And skis. And 4-Wheel drives and not just the ones used by townees clogging up Dulwich Common driving Tarquin and Tabitha to school; the ones in the countryside: tax them the most! Land-owning, gay-hating, EU-subsidy-guzzling, migrant worker-exploiting, Tess of the D'Urbevilles-hanging reactionaries who swindled millions from DEFRA after Foot and Mouth, with your fox hunting and your Save the Village School with no kids in it, and Stop the Post Office Closure, - send a bloody email like the rest of us! Oh and tax the Daily Mail. Call it reparations for that headline I mentioned earlier.

And burn "The Mail on Sunday", it's what Hitler would have wanted.

Because where we divide, dear readers (not you, my lovely readers but readers of the Associated Press) is that I want equality. You just want a tiny State (except for a giant nuclear arsenal to deter all those foreigners from occupying this hocked-up-to-the-eyeballs, politically correct gone mad, strike-bound, single parent paradise / ASBO amusment park you keep slagging off).

And a tinier tax bill.

ON MOTIVATION, THE RYDER CUP AND TWITTER

2010-10-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

New Labour was defeated last week, the New World was defeated this. (All we need is the New Seekers to lose a Battle of the Bands against the old Seekers to complete a hat trick of geriatric revivals.)

There is only so much triumph one can bathe in, bearing in mind the US Ryder Cup team is selected from one nation and Europe from 47, but a little splashing I could not resist. Mainly because the Americans imbue the occasion with such jingoism. In 1999 at Brookline, George W Bush read to the team William Travis's letter from The Alamo. Which cast Europe's self-effacing Mancunian Team Captain, Mark James as General Santa Anna and conjured images of Jim Furyk chipping onto the green using a Bowie knife.

This year it was a speech by Iraq War veteran, US Airforce Major Dan Rooney preparing the Americans for three (four as it turned out) days of ... unmanned drones at high altitude, blanket-bombing Celtic Manor with golf balls in the hope that among the numerous innocent Welsh bystanders getting clobbered on the head, one might actually drop into a hole? I shall forebear judgement but would history have considered it appropriate for the Allied troops before the Normandy Landings to have been addressed by the winner of The Suntory Open? (Obviously it wouldn't have - because Suntory whisky is Japanese.) Or is there an inspirational golfing analogy that eludes me?

"Men, the free world is in the rough today, but your sacrfice could place it within three feet of the pin of victory. So, board your Landing Karts and tee off to battle. Just be carefful to avoid going into a bunker... unless you reach Berlin, in which case the opposite applies".

Then, maybe Dan Rooney's hiring was a mistake, his golfing hosts wrong-footed because he has the word "Major" in his name.

But clearly there is more to golf than the alternative pastime cooked up by those bored aristocrats of the Royal and Ancient too infirm to join the Hellfire Club. Stewart Cink has over 1.2 million followers on Twitter! Even though all a golf-pro does is play golf, practise golf and travel between places where he can play golf and practice golf. What random thoughts can he possibly be tweeting beyond "Drove badly", "Putted well" "Over hit the five iron" or at a stretch "Ian Poulter'a pants look... well erm, pants"?

Not that we Europeans are any less vain and attention-craving. A fellow Tweeter of global provenance is none other than Britain's own Renaissance Man, Stephen Fry. That is if by "Renaissance Man" we mean "posh chap who reads autocue on panel games and awards ceremonies" as opposed to "sculptor, architect, cartographer, military engineer, anatomist, geologist and botanist who painted The Last Supper, Vitruvian Man and the Mona Lisa, then invented the helicopter."

I shall postpone my diatribe against the poisonous contagion of electronic communication gadgets but only if my critics desist from cliched reproaches involving Canute and tides or that specious adage about how "you can't put the genie back in the bottle": an attitude, had it been adopted by the W.H.O. Immunisation Project, that would have left 74 million paralysed African children after the recent polio epidemic.

I shall leave you with... actually I cannot leave since the traffic here has reached gridlock following the RMT voting to strike on the London Underground, and my parents taught me two things: never hit a child and never cross a picket line. And given that the Intelligence Services are currently warning of terrorist ambitions to attack public transport in a major European city you might wish to do the same.

I CAN'T THINK OF AN ORIGINAL PUN INVOLVING THE WORDS MILIBAND AND BROTHERS

2010-09-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

So Ed Miliband beats David Miliband by 50.65% to 49.35% of the vote to become Labour Leader and already the newspapers are saying, because the margin of victory was so slim, Ed M didn't really win at all.

A reasonable position should one also be of the opinion Dennis Taylor did not actually beat Steve Davis in the 1985 World Snooker Final because there was only one ball in it; the USA did not beat Europe in the 1991 Ryder Cup because Bernhard Langer's final putt only just missed; and guess what?! President Kennedy is actually still alive... because that bullet only just entered his brain. (However this does explain how George Bush became President in 2000 despite Al Gore winning 48.38% of the vote to his 47.87%). It all makes Zeno's Paradoxes look like a Rubik's Cube. (Bad example, as I am to a Rubik's Cube what a fish is to a harp.)

I must confess an interest though as I did campaign for Ed M. By that I mean I asked my friend, Adam to vote for him but it turns out the BMA is not an affiliated union. The Communication Workers Union is, so I tried the postman who is always getting me to sign for parcels on behalf of my much more popular and solvent neighbours; but he said he would not be voting for either Miliband as he was convinced "the brothers are in it together".

I have never been seduced by the appealing announcement of "Who cares? They are all as bad as each other!" ever since it was made in front of an Identity Parade by the only witness to the theft of my shopping bags. (Candidly, no one has ever tried to seduce me, not even Mrs Robinson). And the reductionist claim that all brothers are alike is not only offensive to Cain's widowed sister-in-law but also to elderly peace-loving Florida Little League coach, Hans Hitler. (Okay I made Hans up simply to prove a point... but I have a suspicion that Cain and Abel were also made up, and for the same reason.)But there are many real-life examples of siblings you mix up at your peril.

More than just casting directors will avow to the difference between intense Sean Penn of "Milk" and "Dead Man Walking" and roly-poly brother Christopher Penn of "Best of the Best 2" and "Charlie and the Talking Buzzard". Between Ralph Fiennes of "Schindler's List" and "The Reader" and Joseph Fiennes of "Rancid Aluminium" and "Killing Me Softly." (German actors must hate Ralph Fiennes for bagging all their best roles but I would have agreed to be in "Killing Me Softly" simply for the intimate scenes opposite exquisite, American mummer Heather Graham.)

And just as only the most devoted and nostalgic of Gooners would swap Heather Graham for George Graham, any sane person must appreciate the difference between, for example, Suzy Quatro (there she is again!) the 70's singer,and Audi Quattro the 80's car. Between Christopher Eccleston who as Doctor Who feuded with Davros, a tiny ugly megalomaniac living vicariously through a race of machines trying to take over the world; and Bernie Ecclestone, a tiny... well, you can see where I'm going with this. And finally, between Dame Peggy Ashcroft the legendary Shakespearean actress and former lover of Paul Robeson; and Lord Michael Ashcroft: unelected, tax-dodging, billionaire non-dom (and "Colonel Kurtz" of Central America) whose gilded fists pull the strings of the British Conservative Party.

Which brings me back to Ed Miliband, now Leader of the Labour Party who, should he dare not pay back his debt to the 40% of those 10% of political levy opted-in members of the GMB who voted for him in one third of the electoral college, will no doubt wake up with the severed head of his favourite boiler on the pillow next to him.

All this is of course irrelevant to the Murdoch press who doubtless will use all its organs (and I use that term carefully) to cast Ed Miliband as Carlos the Jackal without the sun glasses and sideburns. But to quote comedian John Gordillo in sarcastic response to a heckled endorsement from a scruffy belligerent drunk "thanks - that's like getting a good review in News of the World". That exchange took place while Thatcher was still in power. Time will tell if things have changed.

Yours, "Red" FC Naylor.

PRAISE WHERE PRAISE IS DUE

2010-09-22T04:23:00.000-07:00

I have recently been reprimanded for the pervasive tone of negativity on my blog. Pavla was particularly upset by last Thursday's sarcastic remarks about abortion and lit a candle for me. (In my defence, my other remarks led to some very friendly messages from chaps I have never met, including a free offer of some mispelt iPhone application called "Grindr".)

So this week I have decided to be less Franz Kafka and more Patch Adams, concentrating only on good news. (More successfully then the misnamed "Good News Bible" which [spoiler alert] has the identical downbeat ending as the previous "Bad News Bible": the hero still gets killed in front of his mum.)

I begin by celebrating Hillary Clinton, Sarah Brown, Cherie Blair and Michelle Obama who are all in New York to lobby the UN Development Summit. And a special congratulations to Samantha Cameron who this week has finally joined her fellow current and former First Ladies in the public arena. For Samantha has shown great spirit by not chasing the lemming-like stampede and not using her global influence to tackle maternal mortailty and world poverty but rather has generously volunteered to help out... at London Fashion Week! She has correctly divined that people need more than food and medicine to survive. They need clothes as well. And nice ones too! Consequently she has made no less than an open-ended committment to sit in the front row and stare at fashion models tottering up the runway in expensive designs and impractical shoes for all of the twice-yearly event. She is not even asking to be paid since Number 10 is only up the road from Somerset House anyway.

This recent mum's self-sacrifice is a beacon of that priceless civic duty ethos so central to husband David's Big Society. Bless you Samcam. (Word of warning: try to resist Kate Moss's offer to accompany her to the toilet and Naomi Campbell's invitation to check out her new jewellry; oh and bring a packed lunch as you will find less food there than in a Darfur refugee camp.)

My gratitude must also go to Cardinal Walter Kasper for describing landing at Heathrow Airport as like "landing in a Third World country". One often overhears this familiar lament that there are too many foreigners in the UK, but rarely a foreigner making it. No hypocrite this Cardinal either, as he swiftly buzzed off back to the continent thereby reducing the visitors-from-abroad-count by one. I am only disappointed that I missed the opportunity to point out that Heathrow International Airport's demographic might not be representative of the rest of the country in the same way that driving into the O2 Arena car park during a Justin Bieber concert might have led him to conclude the UK was populated exclusively by white pre-teenage girls and giant black security guards.

On the subject of Germans criticizing diversity I need also to thank Pope Benedict himself for his illuminating exegesis on the roots of the Holocaust. His convinced insistence that atheism was to blame has, most opportunely, saved me from falling into Satan's trap. For the Devil's False Logic - given that

i) Nazi Germany's closest allies were Catholic Italy, Catholic Croatia and Catholic Vichy France

ii) Polish Catholics slaughtered their Jewish neighbours in Jedwabne and other villages

iii) Although officially neutral, actually very pro-German were Catholic Spain and Catholic Ireland (whose President, Douglas Hyde and Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera both offered condolences on Hitler's death

iv) Countless Nazi war criminals fled to the warm embrace of Catholic South America

and

v) Why? Because they had been defeated by the atheist USSR.

- was leading me in a completely different direction!

Although I must confess that being lectured on the Shoah by a former member of the Hitler Youth is a bit like receiving body-building tips from Karen Carpenter or having a Saga Holiday endorsed by Harold Shipman. Still what sort of Pontiff would he be were he not to pontificate?

And there you have it - no censure nor castigation this week. As Pangloss declared to Candide "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" (particularly if you are a Northampton football fan).

Must go, off to see a repeat of Glee.

APOSTOLIC VISITATION 2

2010-09-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

I shall be having sex with men and performing abortions: today in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Friday 17th in Twickenham and Westminster, Saturday 18th in Hyde Park and Sunday 19th in Birmingham.

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME...

2010-09-12T06:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading about Middlesborough Ladies' pending football tour of North Korea (which should delight my old friend Derek 'Robbo' Robson)and couldn't help notice the marked reluctance with which the reporter included that country's actual title and I quote her words: "or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as it prefers to be known".

"Prefers" presumably because erm, well, erm, because that's its name? I'm sure that boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr would prefer "little yellow chumps", or does he reserve that epithet exclusively for Filipinos? Either way, since when has it become unreasonable to expect to be called by one's name? "They call me Mister Tibbs" hisses Sidney Poitier in response to Rod Steiger's racist condescension in In the Heat of Night. "They call me FC Naylor" I mumble slightly less assertively in response to "Oi, old bald bastard!" being shouted by schoolkids from the opposite platform at Queen's Rd, Peckham.

So, perhaps you don't think North Korea deserves to be called "democratic", well I don't think Great Britain is especially great or the United States especially united - have you heard what Alabamans say about Californians, or Alaskans say about all 49 other states? And while we're on the subject, who else doesn't think South Dakota, at 45°N is especially south? But that's all irrelevant because that is what those places are called.

Of course there are some exceptions where there are alternative names. The residents call them "The Falkland Islands", the neighbours call them "Las Malvinas", and the majority population simply "baaaaaaaaaaaa". Most people think "Derry" and "Londonderry" are two different places. What Israelis call "Judea and Samaria", Palestinians call "The West Bank". Just don't confuse it with "The West End" or despite patience in the queue you are more likely to end up with a body-search than discounted tickets for "Jersey Boys", which incidentally is set in the state of New Jersey, not on the island of tax evaders, children of collaborators and creamy milk.

But sometimes even close allies use different names for the same thing. The Americans refer to the war to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait as Operation "Desert Storm" after the terrain and action required to liberate it; the British called it Operation "Granby" after the pub John Major was drinking in when he was rung to see if he wanted to join in. The film "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was retitled "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in America in case they didn't know what a philosopher was, or probably did know but sure as hell did not want to see a movie about one. (Hence my screen adaptation of Heidegger's "Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity" floundering in development hell despite having Jason Statham attached). De Sica's neo-realist masterpiece "Ladri di Bicicletta" is translated correctly as "Bicycle Thieves" in the UK but perversely as "The Bicycle Thief" in the US. Maybe they had a censored version with all the other thieves cut out. But most telling is Stieg Larsson's best-selling thriller being translated into English as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" which sounds like a book about a hot stripper; the original Swedish "Män som hatar kvinnor" i.e. "Men who hate women", less so.

I shall leave this subject with an appeal that you distinguish between "The Real IRA" and "The Real Roxanne." The former wish to blow up British banks (possibly because Irish banks no longer have anything in them)and are locked in a bitter feud with former Nationalist allies whom they deem to have betrayed the cause of a united Ireland , the latter is a female hip hop MC in a feud with another person called Roxanne.

I am still working on my video journal of the life of Marina Chartwell, the only wrinkle being she refuses to be videoed. The words she used were "intrusion of privacy". Actually I'm paraphrasing, what she said was "No fucking way you old perv!" I blame Andrew Coulson.

ITMA

2010-09-07T23:02:00.000-07:00

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Like a Japanese horror sequel or a short story by Edgar Allan Poe the Cimmerian shadow of my nemesis blinds me to all else around me, his dislocated voice as deafening as the incessant drumming of an immured heart. (Talking of the dead and buried, why a padlock on the holdall containing Gareth Williams' decomposed remains? To stop him climbing out?) Forgive my ghoulish mien but I was scrutinizing a photospread rating the comparative charms of Joan Jett and Suzy Quatro when my seventies rock-chick leering was interrupted by quotes from THAT BOOK hurtling like audio Doodlebugs out of the radio towards me.

Quotes from Tony Blair's "The Odyssey", include how, after Labour Leader John Smith unexpectedly died, he "devoured Cherie with animal passion". The Telegraph compares this section to Mills and Boon, but I rather see the influence of the Bard. Specifically Macbeth after the Thane of Cawdor murders King Duncan, and Lady Macbeth seizes his bloodied hands and urges him to usurp the now vacant throne. Is this a cryptic confession? Should we re-open the inquest on Robin Cook too? In a later passage, Blair describes President Bush as a man he admires, one of courage, integrity and intelligence: "As I entered the Oval office, George W put down his well thumbed copy of Balzac and welcomed me in Latin, before revealing how he prayed to Jesus before approving 152 executions in a row when Governor of Texas."

Okay, the Balzac and Latin I made up but Bush's lust to kill convicts rendered helpless and harmless through permanent incarceration is true.

Granted, Tony Blair's "Long Walk to Being Special Adviser to Zurich Financial Services and JPMorgan Chase" is not the first political reminiscence at odds with the facts it alleges to reflect. For instance Blair's autobiography has loads of sex in it while Bill Clinton's has none.

Yet who would not buy a Minister's memoir that really and honestly told it how it was? One that opened with "So I took the bag of cash from the businessman and spent it all on Russian call girls, and cake." or "This was only the first of my many mistakes"? Or "I entered politics to make a difference... to my earnings, my influence and my ability to pull birds despite being bad at sport and uglier than Henry Kissinger." (Women enter politics to stop blokes like him.)

Consequently I have decided on the subject of my film. A video journal. A candid and true account of a life. Not of my own - I already have my autobiographical book Dead Man Talking, coming out later this year similarly detailing all the prominent women I "devoured passionately" to celebrate the deaths of leading politicians: Barbara Castle after Charles de Gaulle died in 1970, Benazir Bhutto after Barbara Castle died in 2002 and Chantelle Houghton from Big Brother after Benazir Bhutto died in 2007. (For the sake of all women let us pray Chantelle stays healthy). And of course a chapter on the contemporary public figures I admire most: Vladmir Putin for his humility, Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army for his compassion, General Than Shwe for his sense of humour and Kim Jong-il for his style.

No, my subject will be Marina Chartwell, Pavla's sixteen year old stepdaughter. Adam says now that I am in remission it would be therapeutic for me to focus less inwardly on myself and more outwardly on others. So I have chosen this teenager, teenagers being the only group of people even more self-absorbed than me.

I'll let you know how it goes next week.

Tony Blair's "My Struggle" is available from all good bookshops not being picketed by literary critics, unemployed ghostwriters and pacifists.

JOURNEY'S END

2010-09-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's happened again. I am desperately trying to look forward, not back, when just like flipping Jason Voorhees, he comes back to haunt me. Clue: the synopsis of his new book is "I'm great. The bloke who came after me is rubbish. The next bloke needs to be, well, more like me!" Rafa Benitez? Adrian Chiles? Mike Nolan from the original line up Bucks Fizz?

No. On the eve of electing a new Labour leader, Tony Blair steals the limelight from the candidates like James Mason slapping Judy Garland during her Oscar speech in A Star is Born merely to tell us in print that he regrets banning fox hunting but does not regret the Iraq war. Well of course he would. He invaded a third world country to fulfill the wishes of the US government and we know how Americans also love Olde Englande traditions. You only have to see Madonna riding around her estate dressed like a Bermondsey pall bearer. And Americans extra love the sport of hunting. No weekend passes without a crowd of enthusiasts climbing into a pick-up dressed in plaid shirts and baseball caps, rifle on the rack off to shoot... half a dozen co-workers and the immediate family of their estranged wife.

I know I moan obssessively about TB like some betrayed lover. But the difference is I never did love him. I didn't cheer, I wept in the early hours of May 3rd 1997. Yes, partly because I had locked myself out (again) and partly because QPR had just missed the play-offs after relegation from the Premiership the previous year. But mainly because Labour had finally beaten the Tories in a general election, the Daleks of British politics were vanquished... only to discover Dr Who wasn't David Tennant or Matt Smith, he'd regenerated as Simon Cowell.

So let this be your final farewell Anthony, the Norma Desmond of British politics. You used to be big. You're not anymore and not because the pictures got small. But because you don't have a single socialist hair in your sinister (tinted) brows, not a single Christian tooth in your insincere smile. And that part has already gone to David Cameron. Fade to Black. End Credits. Audience goes for a slash.

FC NAYLOR HAS PROOF

2010-08-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no blog this week as I am proof-reading the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of FC Naylor. If I don't hurry up it will not be ready for Christmas, then what will there be for people to buy?

Best wishes

FC

NO SUSSEX PLEASE, WE''RE BRITISH.

2010-08-17T05:39:00.000-07:00

Fought class war on West Wittering beach this week when two posh virgins on horseback defecated on the sand - the horses not the girls, I would have understood the latter as a legitimate Dirty Protest against conditions at their boarding school. I rebuked the teenage transgressors for disrespecting (is that a genuine transitive verb?) the human beach-users too poor to holiday abroad. Unfortunately they turned out to be just as wealthy as the equestrians and I felt as isolated as Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers . I returned to Pavla's husband's holiday cottage but Pavla and his daughters were watching The Camomile Lawn on DVD and I wasn't prepared to wade through four hours of Mary Wesley for a brief glimpse of Tara Fitzgerald topless, when I can watch her in Sirens and get Elle McPherson and Portia de Rossi thrown in.

Alas the newspaper provided even less solace when I saw Tony Blair staring at me with a look of bogus piety to shame a Florentine Pope. His royalties from A (The/My/The One True Divine Emmissary's) Journey are all going to veterans' organisation, The Royal Britsh Legion, which is a bit like the proceeds of Ian Huntley's autobiography going to an After-School Club. Well, you know what the Chinese say about charity: "People only give away what they do not want" (clearly they do want Tibet, then). So I am hereby announcing that the proceeds from my forthcoming book, Dead Man Talking will all be going... to me. Because I actually need them to live on.

Mr Blair is already worth about £15 million although the precise amount is unclear because the accounts of Windrush Ventures No 3 LP (Blair's investment vehicle not a new Brian Eno album) are more cryptically opaque than Leeds Utd's. (Blair obviously chose the MV Empire Windrush as the inspiration for his holding company's name because his struggle: Fettes School, Oxford University, Barrister's Chambers, Prime Minister, Lecture Circuit, Senior Adviser at JPMorgan Chase... so closely parallels that of: post-war Jamaican immigrant, racism, Bus Conductor.)

And for those of you who rightly suspect I am pursuing a vendetta against the man, I am and will continue to attack him in print until the day he dies, after which I will attack his reputaion until the day I die. After which I will have my body cryogenically frozen (next to that of Bubbles the Chimpanzee), resurrect, build a time machine like John Connor in Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines and start all over again!

Have to go now. The man who runs this internet cafe keeps whistling Darth Vader's theme from fucking Star Wars.

OH CHICHESTER, SO MUCH TO ANSWER FOR...

2010-08-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

As the title suggests, I am currently out of town. My London location-scouting cut short after a single visit to Sir John Evelyn's Deptford mansion, famously trashed by a young houseguest who went on to become Peter the Great. Russians abroad have never been the most respecful visitors... ask anyone over thirty from East Berlin.

Pavla has insisted I convalesce with her new family who are holidaying on one of the wealthier shores of West Sussex. I could not demure -it's free. Though I confess to leaving the City behind with the bittersweet feelings of a Normandy-bound G.I. bidding farewell to a pregnant land-girl.

Ah, England's seaside towns - the sight of elderly widows fighting over disabled parking bays while schoolgirl sirens lure middle-aged men onto marriage rocks, the smell of malt vinegar and tattoo ink, the sound of rich Londoners moaning that the value of their second homes have gone down. ("Tonight Matthew I will be Philip Larkin")

Personally I celebrate a fall in house prices, how else will they become affordable to the low paid and the young currently engaged in endless badly-muffled sex in their ageing parents' spare room.

I also celebrate Naomi Campbell, put on this earth to demonstrate the distinction between super model and role model. Just a short blog this week as I have to go and watch a family movie at Cineworld Chichester. I shall report on family holidays and "Knight and Day" anon.

HOME TRUTHS, OWN GOALS

2010-08-04T04:31:00.000-07:00

I survived my baby-sitting challenge, successfully keeping my granddaughter alive overnight. A low target, you might speculate, but my childminding motto is borrowed from the writers' mantra on Seinfeld "No learning, no hugs." My daughter-in-law, Mary, casually asked my how baby was. "A bit of a strain", I replied "she didn't take to the bottle too readily, cried without reason a couple of times and vomited on my antimacassar." I wasn't complaining, just being honest, but Adam scolded me the next day.

"FC, you NEVER say anything negative to a mother about her child! Now Mary will feel terribly guilty about leaving Frances with you and probably never go out without the baby ever again. You should just say 'a little angel' and smile."

This has made me type a rhetorical question into my lap top. "When is honesty not the best policy? Is plain-speaking plain wrong? And do home truths lead to own goals?" (Last week I was Jodie Marsh without the boobs, this week I am Carrie Bradshaw without the shoes.)

Worryingly, answering this question places me on the verge of endorsing David Cameron's provocative but truthful remark that elements of the Pakistani state support "terrorism." Well, it is no secret the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence helped establish the Afghan Taliban in the Nineties. (Plus President Asif Zardari is nicknamed in Pakistan "Mr Ten Percent" for his history of taking kickbacks when his wife, Benazir Bhutto was in charge; Mike Gatting was right to shout at cricket umpire, Shakoor Rana in 1987 - compare the number of lbw decisions against Pakistan playing at home with those against visiting nations before the introduction of neutral umpires - and Umpire Darrell Hair was right to penalize Inzamam Ul-Haq's side in 2006 since the rules clearly state if you refuse to take to the field you forfeit the match.)

On the verge but not on the lawn... unless DC is willing also to point his truth revolver at other countries, such as

Israel - "Netanyahu and Lieberman hate Arabs"

or our European allies such as

Italy: "Berlusconi is a tax-dodging, judge-bribing, perjury-commissioning, Mafioso sexual predator";

France:"Sarkozy is an adulterous, money-laundering midget";

Russia: "Putin is a vote-rigging, body-building midget, responsible for poisoning emigre dissidents and shooting investigative journalists and human rights activists".

(Putin and Sarkozy's punishment: to be be photographed exclusively standing next to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria or statues of Abraham Lincoln.)

Then Cameron can point it at

Britain: "Prince Philip murdered our Princess because she was pregnant with an alien/human hybrid"

and at himself: "I am the sweet-smiling figurehead at the prow of a ship of millionaire pirates waging secret war against (i) the working class (ii) the State as an instrument for social and economic justice (iii) sharing."

In exchange I shall unlock my trunk of uncomfortable truths, viz - when Chelsea get knocked out of Europe I wish ill on all other English clubs out of raw jealousy; I fancy the Captain of the Cheerleaders in Glee; I don't miss Jade Goody; Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew and Othello are respectively anti-semitic, misogynistic and racist; everything Dickens wrote (bar A Christmas Carol) would be twice as good if half as long,Proust is pedantic and whatever they tell you, anybody who has ever read the whole of Remembrance of Things Past got very, very bored.

But let's end on a postive note. Lindsay Lohan, whom I name-checked last week, has been released from jail only two weeks into a three month sentence... on grounds of good behaviour. Given that her bad behaviour of getting high in public, crashing her car and then not attending her probation appointments was quite difficult to repeat while in solitary confinement, her fortnight of virtue is not quite on the scale of the Temptation of Christ. But she was very good in Parent Trap, Mean Girls and Freaky Friday so best of luck going straight.

Next week I will be scouting London locations for my film.

LEADING BRANDS

2010-07-28T03:34:00.000-07:00

I am in debt to loyal readers of this column. In the space of a single week the number of followers has risen from seven to thirteen, growth matched only by the birthrate in shanty towns on the outskirts of Mexico City. Thirteen means one more follower than the Disciples in the Gospels which makes me bigger than Jesus... but still smaller than The Beatles. I may remain too puny to win a cage fight with Montgomery Burns but I am a leader!

Of course I am joking. Nobody's leader am I(sorry, my syntax appears to be channeling Yoda) just another passing soul in a random, Godless universe craving attention - a sort of Jodie Marsh with GCSE's. But it has prompted me to cogitate on the expectations and challenges of modern leadership.

For instance, we know that Labour is seeking a new leader after the demise of the stolid but uninspiring Gordon Brown - King Harold to David Cameron's William the Conqueror (and not because of the eye). But do they really want a return to the Presidential tone of a Tony Blair, a man who not so much led as possessed the Labour Party, like the creature that got inside that dog in John Carpenter's "The Thing". Or the demon Pazuzu in "The Exorcist" that took over Linda Blair - which would explain those regular 360 degree turns in policy?

Or perhaps they could use a Captain of Industry such as departing BP CEO, Tony Hayward as their template. The man who complained about having to work late, after one of his oil rigs tore a hole in the earth big enough to house Westfield Shopping Centre (there's an idea...) "I want my life back," he moaned, days after 11 employees lost theirs (albeit officially only "presumed dead"... just in case they are subsequently found to be at a sleepover with the Little Mermaid and Sebastian the Crab). Hayward seems to have, in turn, based his leadership style on World War One Field Marshall, Douglas Haig who also moaned "Yes, well I would like it to have been over by Christmas too! I have pheasant on the table and gifts and scullery maids to open."

Now some claim that Hayward, like fellow retiring CEO, RBS's Fred "The Shred" Goodwin is an innocent victim of the politics of envy on account of the size of their (remuneration) packages. But, although a socialist, I am by no means an enemy of differentials... as long as no one in an organisation earns more than 10 times what the lowest paid person gets. This means Lionel Messi can have his £200,000per week provided the Barcelona kit man is on £20,000 per week; Jonathan Ross remains entitled to £10,000 for a three hour radio show if the Sound Engineer gets at least £1000 and I will not begrudge Mr Hayward earning £1,000,000 per annum (plus £10 million pension pot) for running BP provided the canteen staff at 1 St James' Square are all on a hundred grand a year. What's that I hear you say, Tony - "Oh but I deserve every penny because of the hours and the pressure and the responsibility" ? I'm sorry, that piece of whining was muffled by the sound of yachts racing round the Isle of Wight while elsewhere half an ocean of sealife suffocates in water the consistency of babyfather Christiano Ronaldo's hair.

Still he could have earned some respect if not cash had he dared to face the music in front of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee this week. Who cares if they are picking on you. I would happily confess at a Congressional Hearing to being personally responsible for Hurricane Katrina, sub-prime mortgages, the Lindbergh kidnapping and the education of Lindsay Lohan, even encourage them to call me names, if I were picking up an £11,000,000 pay off on my way out.

Lastly we have the LibDem leadership paradigm - Nick Clegg: the "Rachel" of the Coalition, nice hair but shallow. Except I suspect his increasingly moribund sojourn as Deputy Prime Minister seems suspiciously a mere stepping stone towards a peerage. Which will leave Nick with a dilemma since I'm pretty sure his party want to abolish the House of Lords.

Well, come Saturday I will have to decide on my very own leadership system as I baby-sit my granddaughter, Frances, overnight for the first time. I'm currently torn between the "hands-on direction and guidance" pattern of leadership and the "arms-length role-modelling" method. Fidel Castro or Steven Gerrard? And if I do choose to lead football-captain-style, "by example", and successfully avoid soiling myself, crying out loud and climbing inside the interesting-looking washing machine can I rely on a six month old doing the same?

Find out next week.

Oh and thanks to all those who offered suggestions for themes for my short film project which can be currently summarized as "spy pigeons in a land without fish" a sort of anti-"Kevin Costner's Waterworld", which wouldn't be a bad thing.

SICK MAN OF EUROPE

2010-07-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

"British workers are the laziest skivers in mainstream Europe, costing the economy billions!" Thus reported The Express this week. "35 million sick days claimed per year", I read. Make that 35 million and 1 as I just used that excuse to duck out of a blind date.

My ex, Cressida wants me to start dating again - no doubt to make her feel less guilty for walking out on me... in 1985! She came round, ostensibly to check on my VHD, happily in remission - unless you are the Sick-Finder General sent by the government to review my claim for Incapacity Benefit, in which case its bad, really bad - but actually to sign me up to an internet lonely hearts club. I thought I had successfully sabotaged Mustard's uninvited patronage by adopting Heath Ledger's facial tic from The Dark Knight and screaming "Love me! Love me!" into the dating site's webcam before confessing to being a Russian Deep Cover spy but it didn't put off a Christian lady from Hanwell. (All her previous relationships had been with Lifers she met as a Prison Visitor in Belmarsh, so my relative accessibility I suppose gave me the edge). I do feel bad about my dissembling, but truly any woman is better off arms-length with the Stockwell Strangler than intimate with an old crosspatch like me.

I felt particularly awful feigning illness because we Socialists and Trade Unionists are all too frequently and falsely portrayed as terminally workshy even though our workplace icon is Alexei Stakhanov from the USSR, and not Sid Plummer from "Carry On at Your Convenience." In fact it is much more likely to be someone from the Capitalist class or its bourgeois representatives in government launching himself at the opportunity to "pull a sicky." It is a Conservative Prime Minister who is currently adamant that Gary Mckinnon is too ill with autism spectrum disorder to face trial in a US court for hacking into secret Pentagon computers (although Cameron might have felt more pro-American if he hadn't been mugged by members of the US Senate railing against Big Oil, which is a bit like members of the House of Lords lambasting stately homes).

It was Home Secretary, Jack Straw who decided unrepentant Military Dictator, Augusto Pinochet was too poorly to fly 1200 kilometers to Madrid in Spain to face war crimes charges (including his underlings electrocuting the genitals of British doctor, Sheila Cassidy and breaking every finger of folk guitarist, Victor Jara ) but healthy enough to fly 12,000 kilometers to Santiago in Chile. And it was millionaire, financial super-fraud, Ernest Saunders who was let out of jail only 15% into his sentence after claiming to have Alzheimer's, from which he swiflty became the only human in history to recover. Not to mention convicted bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi being released from jail by Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Justice allegedly because he only had three months to live... he's still alive now, a year later. (Although he is actually innocent but that's another story).

So, slanderers of the working man and woman, let he who is without self-certification note cast the first stone...

Must go and lie down now, got a bit of a tickly throat.

PS if any of you readers have any suggestions for subject matter for the film I wish to make please feel free. The lack of comments after each blog makes me feel like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man... only smaller, older and with less hair.

LABOUR'S LOVE LOST

2010-07-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

Now that my doctors have passed me physically healthy, my friends (both of them) are trying to persuade me to "engage more." Therapese for "log off your computer, get off the sofa and go outside you lazy self-pitying old man. What do you think you are, on a Gap year?!"

So I am thinking of re-entering the Labour Party. I joined when the Gang of Four split to form the SDP in 1981. Ironic that Shirley Williams' centrist schismatics shared the same soubriquet as that of Madame Mao's radical leftists. Shirley's idea of permanent cultural revolution being broadcasting Glyndebourne's operas live on Schools television, Jiang Qing's being beating the soles of teachers' feet with Nunchucks. But I left in the nineties when Clause 4 of the party constitution replaced its vision of a society built on principles of shared wealth and power, with one of an economy driven by the twin engines of tax havens and looting.

So, in order to catch up with more recent Labour Party news I dipped into Peter Mandelson's autobiography The Third Man. An unusual choice of movie-title expropriation when Antichrist is available - although after yet another chapter claiming how Mandy was personally present when every major political decision ever was being made, Forrest Gump would appear even more appropriate. Looks like I'll have to wait for Tony Blair's autobiography instead. Intriguingly, Blair's book really has had its title changed. The publishers decided "The Journey" sounded too self-important so it is being changed to "A Journey". Hopefully its subtitle "The Messiah" will now become the more modest "A Messiah" and Tony will lift his ban on ever being represented pictorially. I wonder if "A Journey" - subtitle: "The Journey of A Messiah" will record pretty much his first act as Prime Minister: being paid £1 million by Bernie Ecclestone to spread cancer. Showed courage though, for such a fledgling leader to face down the combined might of the European Union as it sought to ban tobacco advertising at all sporting events (including Grand Prix) like some garlic-eating nanny super-state!

Sentiments echoed, I note, by current Secretary of State, Andrew Lansley who is cancelling the national anti-obesity/anti-junk food/ "for God's sake if you can eat an entire family bag of Sweet Chilli-flavoured crisps and a Magnum Gold during the ad break of America's Top Model you can eat a fucking floret of broccoli!" campaign. This he has done because he believes "lecturing people always has the opposite effect". Thank goodness Andrew runs the Health Department and not the Universities, then. Not that Michael Gove needs any help after his announcement to physically tear down all schools everywhere.

What with Clegg's Lib Dems being Mussolini's Fascist Italy to Cameron's Nazi Germany and the Green Party being unelectable outside Brighton (where their closest rivals were the "Interior Design and Garden Landscaping Party", the "I Commute Daily to BBC Broadcasting House Party" and the "When is Fatboy Slim Going to Host another Festival on the Beach? Facebook Group Party") I have concluded not to enter Party Politics after all.

In fact I think Pavla and Adam knew this all along and just wanted to trick me into showering and changing my clothes. Which I have done and now I am going outside for some cake and a smoke.

THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN....

2010-07-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

... and according to The Daily Star, following yesterday's UK Supreme Court test case, swarms (there must be a better collective noun for homosexuals. A "pride" ?) of gay asylum seekers are now going to pour into the country.

I say roll out the pink carpet and welcome on board!

Doesn't the Editor understand that gay people make perfect immigrants. Only a tiny number have children so no pressure on social services, no bulging class sizes, no crowded waiting rooms at the GP, no over-stretched Health Visitors, no rise in child benefit expenditure, nor child tax credits, no queue-jumping for social housing. And on average gays earn more than straight people which means tax revenues go up. And they spend more too, so that means more liquidity in the economy and not just retail and leisure. Gays are more house-proud so more work for the depressed building and allied sector! In this dismal time of fiscal tightening and double dip recession there could be no better economic news! Plus everywhere will be much tidier and smell nicer too. I say well done for once, the British justice system.

TWILIGHT:ECLIPSE AKA WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN MY HEAD

2010-07-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

My former neighbour, Pavla has returned. I presume she is taking temporary respite from her new concupiscent husband and his needy children and is now visiting her old postcode (Have others noticed how ugly British men can frequently entrap good-looking foreign women? Our charming accent evidently casts some sort of international face-blindness spell) for some temporary respite. Pavla has no news about investors for my play apart from an old Krakow University friend of hers but he turns out to be a runaway Priest whose funds are exclusively in the form of lead stolen from the roof of Saint Miligost the Importune. I decline.

Instead Pavla took me to the cinema. A rare event for me, although the free tea and biscuits for Seniors on Silver Tuesdays is exerting a Siren-like draw. Pavla has chosen "the type of movie Frances (my granddaughter) will want you to take her to when she is older." Thus was I gulled into seeing Twilight Saga : Eclipse - sadly not an homage to the Rod Serling classic TV series but a teen vampire adventure.

Now, I don't dislike the vampire genre. Bram Stoker's Dracula is not only a compelling proto-Freudian dissection of Victorian sexuality (You get to see Monica Bellucci's boobs in the film!) but also a prescient warning to the British bourgeoisie of the twin threats of European invasion and female emancipation. And indeed within 20 years of publication, Britain would go on to endure both the First World War and the enfranchisement of women.

Within 20 minutes of the start, this mithering celluloid death sentence was draining the will to live from me faster than a speeding vampire (the movie seems to have mixed up Dracula with The Flash) and I was more than willing to swap my Premier Seat at Odeon, Surrey Quays for any rat-infested, mud-filled trench in Ypres or Verdun and pay for the privilege. Its redeeming features harder to find than Seinfeld on Al-Jazeera, I would rather take my granddaughter to see the plasticated corpses of Gunther von Hagens than subject her to the lifeless creations of this Mormon torturer masquerading as a novelist.

Fashioned it would appear for the 19th rather than the 21st Century, the simpering and supine "heroine" - all consumptive pallor and open-mouthed surrender - spends the entire two hours getting fought over like a TV Remote by a husband and wife, or a parking space by two pimps. She is so passive she makes Switzerland look like Sparta. Utterly uninterested in the world inside, of the imagination, or the world outside, of other people, she is 24/7 obssessed with a pretty languid youth - and not in an interesting way like Death in Venice but in a stupid way. Stupid - (a) because he won't have sex with her until they are married; and (b) because when they do have sex she will be doing it with a vampire. Yes, unbeknownst to the layman, the divinely authored Book of Moroni evidently forbids pre-marital sex while vouchsafing necrophilia. Strange state, Utah.

But I might have tolerated the antediluvian sexual politics if the action had been decent. (Scarface is likewise a very bad role model for boys, but who could not want to say hello to his little friend). Unfortunately the heroic Cullen Clan's Waterloo has more the epic quality of the station than the battle. An unstoppable army of super-strong Undead, resembling more the cast of a Vodafone flashmob than the Vampire SS we were led to envisage, are massacred within minutes without inflicting a single casuallty. Oops, I forgot, a werewolf does dislocate his shoulder (but not as dramatically as when Bryan Robson did at Mexico 1986).

The climax is further heightened by the arrival of The Volturi (sadly not the latest model of Alfa Romeo), some invincible, awe-inspiring High Council of Vampire Lords. Unfortunately they merely stroll into frame like four housing estate Hoodies searching for ice cream in a park or lost at a pop festival - "Erm, I think there might be a band playing in this field". I have seen Kylie Minogue make more scary entrances than that. The only spunky female character is a vengeance-seeking vampire-widow with rather fetching pre-Raphaelite hair called Victoria but rather disappointingly she gets her head snapped off. (Even more disappointingly, the actress turns out to be the daughter of Richie Cunningham from Happy Days.)

Pavla tells me there is even going to be a sequel, which I hope is no more than a filmed apology for the first. But the outing did give me ideas. Perhaps I should shelve my play and FC Naylor should make his first... film.

PS I understand there are fans of Twilight who cyber-bully critics of the ouevre. I hope they don't send round the terrifying Volturi High Priestess. Please, please, don't send round... Jane!

STAYING TOGETHER FOR THE KIDS

2010-06-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Back in my old flat... several bills and a note from my ex-wife. "Mustard" (so nicknamed not because her real name is Cressida but because she is rich, powerful, sour and has yellow teeth) has paid the next six months of my rent. Perhaps I should be grateful but heck, I wouldn't be needing her charity if she hadn't cost me my job at the newspaper due to her financial mismanagement. Granted it was her newspaper and she sort of gave me the job as an act of charity in the first place, and to put this in context, she has lost the entire newspaper due to the recession (buy my forthcomng book, kerching!, $$$$$ ££££)... but you understand.

You understand because you know that however nice you behave to each other afterwards (well, however nice she behaves towards me, I should say, as I am never nice to her) , the wounds of divorce will never fully heal. BUT although I am living proof of this, equally I declare this is NOT a good reason for staying together. Neither is that even more miserable shibboleth "you should stay together for the sake of the kids".

Which is precisely the point I made in my letter to Roza Otunbayeva, acting-President of Kyrgyzstan. I wrote it to countervail that toxic tide of advice from politicians and pundits worldwide that she immediately commit all her attention to goddamn holding her country together in light of the recent internecine conflict between her Uzbek and Kyrgyz subjects. Now the way I look at it, being Mother of the Nation is not all that different from being, well, a mother... who (and please let me know if you disagree) upon seeing her two beloved sons raping, amputating and immolating each other would probably conclude maybe it is time they no longer shared a room, don't you think? So why not swallow a little pride and let the southern ethnically Uzbek part of the country break away. Look at the upside - no more genocide - that's got to count for something.

But somehow we have Hindu India refusing to countenance Muslim Kashmir becoming independent. Why not think of it, Mother India, as your child growing up and moving out - be proud you have empowered them to do so, unlike the Italians who pretty much live with their parents, eating their gnocchi and getting their cashmere V-Necks ironed, until they die. And should places like Kashmir, or Nagorno-Karabakh or that tiny, insignificant corner of Mitrovica north of the Ibar river not want independence but wish to be part of Pakistan or Armenia or Serbia that's cool to. Okay this is less like a child leaving home and more like your wife leaving you for another man. But speaking as a divorced man if you love her, set her free. Actually I hate her but nonetheless even I know that when it's over, it is over. Kids or no kids (Cressida took little Vladmir Che Danton with her... and changed his name to Toby) you have to move on for everybody's sake.

So Roza, let the Uzbeks go! Georgia wish South Ossetia and Abkhazia well in their new lives, France help Corsica move her furniture out, Moldova you can still keep Trans-Dniestr as a FaceBookFriend, Spain say adios to the Basques, Canada say adieu to the Quebecois, Israel say shalom to the West Bank, Mordor be nice to Gondor and Scotland, you are free to fuck off any time! (There are twice as many Scots in England as in Scotland anyway.)

And now to see if Cressida is willing to pay my bills as well as my rent.

PS Cressida doesn't really have yellow teeth. In fact, she has rather a lovely mouth which I used to enjoy kissing. Yes, high-achieving, current husband, Alistair Sinclair, I used to French your missus ALL the time!

SPORT BRINGS THE WORLD TOGETHER, APART FROM THE FRENCH

2010-06-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

My old chum, Dr Adam Gold - Watson to my Holmes, except that he doesn't chronicle my adventures and I don't really have adventures but even so he is more like Dr Watson than that balding, nanny-shagging Jude Law whose only decent performance was, surprise, surprise playing a handsome robot in AI - has been to visit me. Adam is also my GP and was the man who broke the news to me that I had Voltaire's Hippocampic Disorder over a year ago (see forthcoming book). I consoled myself at the time that at least my deathly illness was shared with the greatest genius of the Enlightenment only to discover it was actually named after some obscure namesake Belgian pharmacist. However when further research revealed that the Voltaire died from a prolonged and painful urinary infection maybe that's a good thing. Although I remain perplexed as to how sickness and death have resulted in the likes of Alois Alzheimer, Burril Crohn, Hans Creutzfeldt, his mate Alfons Jakob and Mr Non-Hodgkins becoming household names when all they ever managed to do was diagnose chronic maladies, they couldn't bloody cure one! "You are gravely ill, here's a difficult-to-spell name, well my name as it happens, for what's wrong with you. I'm off now." Fuck off. "You have a proclivity for swearing uncontrollably. You should see my colleague, Dr George Albert de Tourette, maybe he can come up with a name for it."

Adam tried to distract me from this vexatious paradox by switching on the World Cup - I think he came over to watch it since his wife, Miriam won't let him watch at home - and we witnessed Algeria tame our national team. This, on the very same day our Prime Minister invites over President Sarkozy of France - a megalomaniac midget who makes Napoleon look like Rodney from Only Fools and Horses - to honour that opportunist, wannabe military dictator, General Charles de Gaulle for his valiant 1940 London radio broadcast to occupied France. Yes, what a hero, single-handedly facing down a microphone in Broadcasting House while bombs were dropping a mere thousand kilometres away, speaking out loud for several minutes despite nursing a slight cold, it beggars belief Portland Place does not resonate with the same epic sacrifice as say, Stalingrad?

Given that twenty one years later, (now President) de Gaulle's underlings in the Paris gendarmerie murdered an estimated 200 peaceful Algerian protesters, drowning many in the Seine in a colonialist massacre that makes Bloody Sunday look like a tickle fight, I think the Algerians deserved their draw against us. And the subsequent implosion of the French national football team is the most joy I have had since those Rwandan genocide-collaborating, Greenpeace activist-murdering, South Pacific-irradiating, post-structuralist bollocks-writing, Iraq sanctions-busting, bribe-taking Elf Oil frauds' football team last flew home in disgrace from the World Cup in 2002!

Adam has ordered me to stop writing, both in his capacity as a friend and on medical grounds, so I shall. His says my Francophobia is completely illogical given my first name is "Francis". I replied he has a brother called "Myron" does that mean he should be in favour of the Moors Murders then? I have to stop anyway though as my baby granddaughter has woken up and is crying. Luckily I am here to comfort her... by ringing her mother and telling her to return immediately from wherever it is she has gone.

Back in my flat next week. Aurevoir and a bientot.

FISTS ACROSS THE SEA

2010-06-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

By coincidence, the very day that my American daughter-in-law opens her home to me (I have now been discharged from hospital but my council flat in Walworth has, due to neglect during the months of my confinement, been deemed unfit for habitation. I point out to the Housing Officer that nothing in SE17 has ever been particularly fit for habitation. But to no avail.) and extends a transatlantic hand of friendship, millions of other hands were being withdrawn.

The reasons are two-fold: oil and sport. I used to preach it would be energy shortages that one day would tear even old alliances apart... not an energy surplus. But apparently, just like "a good thing" oil is also something you can have too much of. And it appears that most Americans blame Britain for the Macondo well's toxic egurgitation. I can't understand this myself. Not because BP is not to blame, it clearly is. But because a US survey shows that an overhwelming majority of Americans have no idea that the 'B' in BP stands for British. So, how did they find out it was us who did it? The answer is that President Obama told them the British did it... but only to stop them believing he did it. Which is what many of them do think. More than one Alabaman I saw on my new hostess' 55inch wall mounted flat screen TV ( I think I might stay here awhile) claimed it was Barack Obama's fault the oil well was still gushing. I agree... if he has the power of telekinesis over the earth's lithosphere and mantle. (Which if he had, he would not be President but one of the X Men. Although, according to his fans, Derren Brown does have this power.)

One may scoff but no doubt if Gordon Brown were still alive - I know technically he is, but politically he is not - I am sure the British public would be blaming him for Deepwater Horizon exploding and the Blow Out Preventer sundering faster than an Essex chastity belt. After all, wasn't it his fault the global economy collapsed, teenagers have become so rude and Our Boys in Afghanistan are, for some bizarre reason, not bullet-proof? Which of course they would have been under a Tory government... providing the Secretary of State for Defence was the Nereid, Thetis, mother of Achilles. I wouldn't be surprised if Gordon hadn't caused AIDS too, by fucking a monkey during his Gap Year in Zaire in the Seventies.

Which brings me onto another irritating false accusation I encountered the same day I moved into Mary's house, this one from the lips (pen? cursor?) of some retired American soccer player called Alexi Lalas. He claims the England v USA World Cup match is of particular importance to Americans because they are totally sick of the English's inflated sense of their own worth, this inflated sense of worth being endemic in our culture. (I accept we do refer to ourselves as Great Britain, but I always assumed the Great to be ironic, such as in Great Yarmouth.)

Of course, normally I would instinctively side with any liberated colony against its former Imperial Masters in a sporting contest. And if this was the centre forward for The Turks and Caicos Islands or even the Republic of Ireland talking about England, I would have sympathized. But not from a nation whose timeless heroes of independence, the Boston Tea Party, were so cowardly they disguised themselves as Indians, so that just in case a Red Coat saw them fearlessly grappling with a box of dried leaves (The Hurt Locker it wasn't) it would be the Shawnee or the Iroquois who got into trouble and not them! I do not need to cite examples of Mr Doo Lalas' inversion of national self-image but put it this way: If any American politician at hustings failed even once to describe America as the greatest country in the world and blessed by God, he or she would be pilloried as being unpatriotic from sea to shining sea, their career fatally wounded. If a British politician made such a brazen claim about this country even once, he would be Nick Griffin and in the BNP.

I am no nationalist nor jingoist. Indeed I am the first to criticize my homeland if there is reason to do so (for examples, see my forthcoming book Dead Man Talking etc) but if there is one thing that this royal throne of Kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature for herself, against infection and the hand of war, this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this realm, this England... is not guilty of, it's boasting.

BAFTA'S GOT TALENT

2010-06-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Having been unable to get anyone to produce my last stage play about the Miners' Strike, Lamplight, after my only investor, a Turkish cigarette smuggler fled the country (see forthcoming book Dead Man Talking etc) - he's not Turkish by the way, the cigarettes are - I have started sending programme ideas from my hospital bed to ITV. Watching the BAFTAS yesterday and seeing Melvyn Bragg's star eclipsed by that of Global Pimp to the disabled and deranged, Simon Cowell (Winner - Outstanding Contribution to Television Special Award), whose hunger to humiliate and exploit celebrity-junkies makes Andy Warhol's Factory look like the BRIT School, I tore up my 6 part "Puppets, Politics and Perestroika - Childrens Theatre Behind the Iron Curtain 1981 -1989" proposal, much to the chagrin of the surviving family members of Sergey Obraztsov. Instead, urged on by my former neighbour Pavla (Mechanical Engineering graduate in Krakow - nanny in Kensington) to be more commercial in order to pay off my debts, I sent Sir Simon some format ideas.

Unwilling to dumb down however, my first reality-based show idea, Pound of Flesh will give Ant and Dec their first taste of Shakespeare by referencing The Merchant of Venice. Contestants eat morsels cooked from the buttocks of a group of guest celebrities and have to identify whose they are before ranking them for yumminess. Alternative title: Come Dine on Me. Next I tendered Lord Cowell (enobled for services to the otherwise unemployable Amanda Holden who left Wild at Heart on account of being out-acted by ungulates) another cultural item to win over those sceptical Blacktop newspaper critics, on account of its Biblical theme. Barabbas has twelve convicted murderers entertain the public at the O2 Arena before being whittled down by the panel to a final four after which the public vote on which three to crucify on Blackheath Common, while the winner is set free. (Hopefully to go on and murder Danii Minogue, a woman so transparently without merit she had to add silicon to her chest and an extra vowel to her first name in order to get noticed.)

Finally I sent Obersturmbannfuhrer von Cowell another idea, this one based on 18th century Bishopsgate and called Bedlam. In it, a group of psychologically-damaged individuals are incarcerated together in a confined space 24/7 while the public are invited to gawp at them and feel, oh, so, superior. I actually got a reply to that email: "Great idea" wrote back His Holiness Archangel Simones Covellus, "unfortunately Davina McCall already hosts it on Channel 4."

Should be out of hospital and rehabbing at home by the weekend, fellow TV viewers. In the meantime bless you BAFTA and let us silently pray for a Triffid meteor shower to render us all blind.

CUMBRIA SAFER THAN EVER BEFORE

2010-06-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

My physiotherapist tells me I am a medical miracle. My (previously considered incurable) Voltaire's Hippocampic Disorder is apparently in remission. A miracle... but in deep financial ordure as last year I bought a Home Entertainment System from Currys on a "Buy now pay nothing for twelve months!" deal - having been assured by doctors I would not see in 2010. (For background, see my forthcoming book Dead Man Talking to be published... blah blah blah)

I am also troubled by the news on hospital TV. Now, the police tend to get a mixed press - though it is rarely mentioned on Newsnight that most PC's are merely exploited proletarians operating under false consciousness as agents of Capitalist repression. And I remain puzzled how Sharon Shoesmith, Director of Haringey Social Services got sacked after tragically Baby P was killed by his mum, but Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commander got promoted after equally tragically Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by one of her officers.

But this business in the Lake District seems unlikely to improve its PR as Cumbrian Constabulary's strategy adopted for yesterday's shooting spree seems to be "stay calm and wait till he gets bored and stops", a policy pioneered by Colorado's finest at Columbine. Maybe because Derrick Bird's first victim was his own twin, they assumed this was actually a suicide gone wrong. (Apparently BP offered to help, guaranteeing to stop the carnage "by the beginning of August, probably.")

I notice too that the media vultures look terribly disappointed in their broadcast reports that the shops are still open and people are still buying pints in the pub, "Indian Spice is still delivering takeaways" is a quote from BBC Radio 5. They'd much rather Whitehaven looked like Port-au-Prince than the local folk got on with living their lives. (Though it is a little spooky how the Cumbrians seem quite so calm, they were hysterical when their sheep were slaughtered during Foot and Mouth in 2001, humans... not so much.)

All the above I said to my daughter-in-law who brought my grandson to see me in hospital. (He was born here the same day I lapsed into my coma six months ago.) It was all very sweet until I got told off for telling him that we live in a random Godless universe right after she invited me to his Christening. So I tried to re-balance this by accentuating the positives and cheerily pointed out that now is the best time to go for a holiday in the Lake District since statistically the odds of two masscares in the same county on subsequent days are extremely low. Likewise, the day after 9/11, I added, was statistically the safest day ever to get an internal flight in the US. What did the FAA do? It shut down the airports!

At this point my daughter-in-law, who is American, started crying. Luckily I was saved
by the bell. Comet were on the line asking about a fridge freezer I bought on HP.

ISRAELI COMMANDOS GO PAINTBALLING

2010-06-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just woke from my coma (For background read my forthcoming book "Dead Man Talking - Famous Last Words of a Dying Man" to be published in the Autumn) to hear news of an alleged IDF massacre on the Mavi Marmara. Tuned in to the radio to check date as I was worried I had gone back in time Ashes to Ashes-style to the Six Day-War of 1967 - "my name is FC Naylor and I have woken up in Carnaby Street wearing purple loons and a tie-dye T shirt...." and heard a very balanced piece about the incident. The Israeli Ambassador explained now was not the time to jump to conclusions, lets wait for the facts to emerge first, eh? (I'm pretty sure those were Harold Shipman's words to his arresting officer. Though I don't remember him getting airtime on the Today programme to put his point of view: "They started it! Old biddies can really wind you up...!").

So here are some alternative findings to the received wisdom that some Israeli Special Forces panicked because it was dark / completely lost it and shot up half a ship's crew defending themselves with some stale pitha bread and a foot stool.

It wasn't the Israelis, it was the North Koreans what done it. Fresh from torpedoing the Cheonan on the 38th Parallel, Kim Jong-il's finest continue their world tour of maritime mayhem.
It was the Sea Shepherd! The militant environmentalists were tipped off that peace activists werre delivering 5 ships of Japanese whale blubber to a Gaza beachfront cafe and took action in their typical gung-ho style.
It was Somali pirates. Swept by unseasonal winds up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal they can no more resist boarding a ship than Ashley Cole can a hairdresser.
It was Freddy Flintoff in a drunken pedalo stunt that got out of control.
What's the fuss about anyway?! Everybody on the ship was already dead anyway, having previously crashed on a nearby island while aboard Oceanic Flight 815. "Mavi Marmara" being Californian for "making it up as we go along."

Got to go. Need to be bed-panned.

test blog

2009-03-11T07:05:00.001-07:00

Hello, hello, is anybody there? How does this bloody thing work?