The Songstone

Exam resit week for the employees. The 'excellent' have passed and gone; the 'no-hopers' who cannot pass have also gone; I am left with the middling rump, who can still pass if they get off their Blackberries and do some work. The class is now fragmented, with the students  all  having different modules to get through, which means more work for yours truly in preparing separate materials for them. In the midst of the hurly-burly comes a call from the bank. "Mr. Simon, sir? It's X here from Al Khaliji." "Yes, yes, what do you want?" "Mr. Simon, sir, your new card is ready. Are you free to come to the bank to pick it up? "No, I'm busy. Call me at 1 o'clock." (fawning) "Yes, Mr. Simon, sir." 1pm : "Mr. Simon, sir?" "Yes, I have no time to come to the bank." "Where are you, sir?" I tell him. "So I will come there at 2 o'clock to give you the card. Is that OK for you, Mr. Simo...

For the land claimers by Gerrard Winstanley You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now, You noble Diggers all, stand up now, The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name Your digging does maintain, and persons all defame Stand up now, stand up now.  Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,  Your houses they pull down, stand up now.  Your houses they pull down to fright your men in town  But the gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.  Stand up now, Diggers all.  With spades and hoes and plowes, stand up now, stand up now  With spades and hoes and plowes stand up now,  Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold  To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.  Stand up now, Diggers all.  Theire self-will is theire law, stand up now, stand up now,  Theire self-will is theire law, stand up now.  Since tyranny came in they count it now no sin  To make...

The Swill is a journalist, of a sort, best known for stuffing his face on an expense account and writing about it. In a long and unvaried career he has managed to offend the Welsh - "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls", the English - "a lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd", the Manx - "hopeless, inbred mouth-breathers known as Bennies" and Clare Balding - "a dyke on a bike".  Our hero has been married twice (once to a Tory MP), shot a baboon whom he wasn't married to and is an alcoholic. Worryingly, he has also sired four children and, like Hitler, is a failed artist. Restaurant reviews don't interest me; restaurant reviewers still less, and in the normal way of things the Swill's vapid meanderings would have passed me by, but when a man who makes a small fortune from modest talent has the cheek to call expats in the Gulf    " parasites a...

Getting my students off their Blackberries and iphones is a never-ending struggle. I've given them an utterly fascinating exercise on memo-writing and what do you know? Half the ingrates are surreptitiously tapping away, hoping I won't notice. Sometimes I pretend not to, but it amazes me how wedded they are to the wretched things. I have visions of them waking up in a cold sweat at 3am, anxious in case they've missed the latest tweet. Anyway, during a break yesterday I heard an appalling screaming coming from a student's phone. I looked up; naturally it was Abdullah .  "What on earth is that noise?" I said testily. "Nothing, teacher, just a video of a girl." I looked askance. "Surely you're not watching naughty videos again, Abdullah? There's a time and a place you know." He looked chastened. "Oh no, teacher. It's not that. This is a girl being buried alive." "What?" "In Iran," he said helpfully. ...

I could give you a list of the cognitive associations that led me to choose these three clips, in this order, but I shan't: with thanks to John Wells : and from the 2nd Red Scare :

There we were, last class of the day, and I've made the students work like slaves for four hours. Time to ease up a bit, so we sit round in a circle and they tell some anecdotes. Abdullah, who owns six Arabian geldings, and has a penchant for taking photos of his innumerable Filipina girlfriends, regaled us with this story, which I shall share with you. "Fifteen years ago a friend of mine, who was 14 at the time, drove out into the desert with a guy who had promised to let him drive his pickup. He was a beautiful boy: long hair, smooth face, and the guy wanted to fuck him. "No, no," said my friend, but the guy was drunk on whiskey and had a gun and his way. When he stopped the pickup to have a pee my friend grabbed the gun and shot him five times, then ran over the body. He came back to Doha in the pickup and with some of his friends went back, drove the body to a remote spot and buried it in the sand, throwing the whiskey bottle into the grave with a curse. Unfo...

That instead of this tawdry little story , Sky News ran something like this: The producer of the long-running TV series hit Midwonder Blunders has been commended after saying part of the show's appeal is an absence of Tories. Brian False-Gay, the drama's co-creator, who has been with it since day one, said in an interview that the shows - which have run for 14 series - "wouldn't work" if there were any Tories in the village life. "We just don't have Tories involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work. Suddenly we might be in Old Amersham. "Ironically, Boreston (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Old Amersham. And if you went into Old Amersham you wouldn't see a human face there. "We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added. ITV was quick to praise Mr False-Gay's remarks. "We are delighted and eu...

I have been looking at Google Labs and their NGram viewer , which allows you to research the use of any word or phrase in the book corpora of (so far) English, French, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish from 1800 to 2000 and spot trends. I have been playing with this and offer one example . 'You' fell from a peak of over 2 instances per 1000 printed words in 1900 to just over 1.2 per 1000 in 1965 (a 40% drop!) before rising again over the past 40 years. Why did 'you' fall so dramatically out of favour? Why has it revived? Was 1965 a particularly selfish year? Are we now writing about others more than about ourselves? Perhaps not . Certainly the long-term trend for 'I' is quite similar to 'you' with a peak at about 1900 and a steady decline thereafter (although since 1980 and the rise of the New Right it seems to be on the increase again). Even so, at 3.5 per 1000 it is still twice as common as 'you' and more common than any other pronoun. Our favouri...

The Great Wave off Kanagawa : Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849)  (thanks to Tom Clark ) And an update on the nest :

This post from the Guardian says it all so well that I am going to take the liberty of posting it. If Melkelly objects to this I am sure he/she will let me know: Another way to fight : THE POWER OF THE POUND As well as strikes, the British people can use the power of the pound. Every pound has power Move our money from Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Tesco Bank to the Nationalised banks or the Nationwide. That will increase the health of the nationalised banks quicker, increase the share price and help reduce the deficit Don't shop at Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Prudential, Boots and any other tax avoiding company. If boycotts worked for South Africa they can work for the British people. Remember companies like Boots and Prudential are making the deficit worse by holding board meetings abroad to avoid paying the tax they are due to pay. Boots should have paid £280 million but paid £14 million instead. Don't give Boots and Prudential our business or our money. 7 million peop...

Still with birds. Perhaps to be heard with this other Nightingale song

I bought a leg of Australian lamb on Thursday. 6lbs for a tenner can't be bad; after hosting a dinner party for four and five days of fricassée, curry and cold cuts, I have just put the bone to simmer for some flavoursome stock.  The dinner party was very pleasant: with the lamb there was mash (potatoes from Saudi) and wilted spinach (from Lebanon), all washed down with vast quantities of South African claret and some good conversation.  I am not as a rule the most sociable of people. At most parties I would be the one standing by the door wondering if anyone would notice if I went home now and listened to Verdi. But although I have to agree that I'm a bit odd, I don't wish to be thought aloof, so it was nice to have company and thank you to those who came. We'll do it again. But not too soon.

Opposite my chamber window, On the sunny roof, at play, High above the city's tumult, Flocks of doves sit day by day. Well, not flocks, but you will remember the various comings and goings of the doves outside my bedroom window. First there was mother dove: Collared dove and her eggs Then one day mother disappeared and one of the eggs, which had been just about to hatch, soon grew black and a bit smelly, until I pushed it over the edge. All was not lost though; after a few days another collared dove turned up and laid two more eggs, one of which soon hatched to produce this little charmer: the lovely doveling So all was well. I felt quite paternal and supplied bits of strawberry and bread, which were scoffed voraciously. On my window-ledge, to lure them, Crumbs of bread I often strew, And, behind the curtain hiding, Watch them flutter to and fro Alas, this passerine paradise could not last. The other morning, very early, there was a squawking and wailing outsid...

I've never been in a desert before. High Wycombe, where I spent my adolescent years, does not qualify, geomorphometrically, so it was a pleasure to take a jeep out of Doha a couple of weeks ago and see the sand: Camels I couldn't avoid the ghastly trap of paying 10 riyals to a Bedouin tout to hold his hunting falcon: A bird in the hand Well, that's Qatar for you: sand. And sea. And Doha. No rivers, lakes or mountains. Still, it has its charms; one of my students has promised to take me out for some falconry. If he passes his exams. Any suggestion that I will now pay him extra attention in class will be vigorously rebutted...

Ah well, the long and pleasant weekend is over and five hours of classes beckon this morning. Enjoy tha Sunday morning lie-in, yer bastards:

February's winner is regular contender Rod Liddle, for this  nasty little piece in the Spectator (no, I don't normally read the rag but it came up on one of the BBC's stories about Libya as an external link). Of course the breathtaking bigotry and sheer ignorance Liddle displays here fit in well at the Spectator, as a glimpse at some of the comments below the article confirms. For a quick tour of the darkest parts of the Tory soul, look no further. If anything nasty should happen here (I don't remotely anticipate it, but...) I want to make it clear that I do NOT wish to be evacuated, by HMG or anyone else; I shall see it through and observe. Oh and by the way, Liddle, my salary, although quite generous, comes nowhere near the vast sums you rake in. If more proof were needed that there is no correlation whatsoever between remuneration and worth, you have surely provided it.

There's an obnoxious little crow flapping round our school. Foulsmalls is the corvid's name; she stinks of spite and stool An ugly bird, of evil mien, she pecks and caws and claws. Her frizzy feathers, frazzled face are fairly fatal flaws This crow is desperate for a mate (her beady eye's on me). Her halitosis, though, is such Don Juan himself would flee For gossip, innuendo, cant Foulsmalls is your bird; a vicious tongue, a nose for dung: her beak's in every turd