Faith And Filth In Fiction

The Lord keeps working in mysterious ways, meaning that despite my review of Shelley Shepard Gray’s Christian-inspirational novel ‘Hidden’ last year, Avon Inspire, an imprint of Harper Collins, continues to dubiously honour me with its publications. The latest two arrivals are by Lori Copeland, who in 1995 “sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honour Him”. This is how I came to own a promotional copy of ‘Twice Loved’, whose front cover posits the question: Will Willow sacrifice her future security for a chance at true love?

In ‘Hidden’, I did indeed find much that was hidden – namely, sex, dressed up as inspirational fiction. I opened a random page of ‘Twice Loved’ (page 119, for those of you who want to jump to the saucy bits) and discovered much the same. “I believe the Gray boys sing well enough, the judge said. But when the new organ arrives, the service will improve enormously.” I say! And further down the same page, a character called Silas announces, “Best beef I’ve had in months.” Uncle Wallace responds, “Wait until you taste the fudge cake.” You can feel the homo-sensuality oozing off the page as these nineteenth century ‘gentlemen’ discuss supposedly mundane matters.

Thinly veiled eroticism aside, let’s cut to the plot. The Civil War’s just finished, and Silas, the bloke who likes a portion of good beef, is beyond middle age, well off, and wooing Willow, the new 19-year-old school teacher at Thunder Ridge, Texas, who’s rolled into town after being advised of his availability, accidentally setting fire to the town saw mill on the day of her arrival. (It happens. And according to the narrative, the fire would “later be compared to the Second Coming” – how much later I’m not sure, given that according to a quick search on Google News, the Second Coming still hasn’t come).

So anyway, Willow thinks that hooking up with beefy Silas would be okay, because she’d have no money worries, and her mates Copper and Audrey, who’ve come along too, would be provided for. End of story, materially happy ever after. But wait, inspirational fiction fans, there’s another character who’s not middle-aged and wealthy, he’s young and dashing and called Tucker (yes, he really is). He owns the saw mill that the heroine reduced to ashes, and he makes Willow weep with his “impossibly good looks and headstrong manner”.

I won’t keep you in suspense any more than I kept myself in suspense (spoiler alert here for all you Lori Copeland addicts), so let’s once again make a beeline for the book’s final page. “Lunging, Tucker seized Willow by the waist and took her with him into the ditch.” You dirty Tucker! “For the first time in a long time, Thunder Ridge was wet.” And the final paragraph begins, “A grin split Willow’s features.” Silas, in case you’re worried about the old fella, cops off with Copper instead.

Having merely perused the text, it seems only fair to tackle some of the 12 questions that the author asks at the end of the book, as though conducting a Sunday school class for a particularly backward group of under-5s. “It seldom rains in Thunder Ridge – just thunder and lightning. Still, the townspeople won’t move away. They prefer to stay and trust in God to send rain. Have you ever been in a position where all you could do was pray and trust? Did God come through for you?”

I wonder what Ms Copeland’s answer is for those who prayed and trusted, but ended up drowning, or shot, or crashing, or uncured anyway. That they didn’t trust and pray hard enough? It’s nice in fiction when God comes through for the characters, but what’s the explanation when prayer doesn’t work in real life? That God likes some of us better than others? Is the entity that created our world and our universe and, I suppose, all the elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies too, is he answering prayers based on some arbitrary code of judgment we have to guess at according to those he chooses to “come through” for? Blimey, it’s enough to make you keep your hands off the fudge cake just in case God disapproves and holds it against you when your plane’s going down and you’re praying and trusting that he’s going to step in and fix the engines.

Great Suburban Traditions No.8: Going To The Mall

If you wanted to put a positive spin on a trip to the mall, you could point out that it’s full of lovely young women flashing you friendly smiles. But don’t delude yourself that they’re up for the kind of water closet cubicle fun that the seasonally employed, nihilistic main character of ‘Bad Santa’ indulged in with middle-aged housewives during his lunch break. These are commercial smiles aimed at dislodging only hard cash from your trousers, and presumably it still works. For a tight-fisted misanthrope, though, the real fun part of going to the mall is to talk to a Young Flashing Smile for five minutes, buy nothing, and then watch the tortured way she will try but fail to bid you a friendly goodbye.

I was at the mall yesterday, and even though the Financial Times is claiming on today’s front page that the US economy is now in recovery, that news has yet to manifest itself in the nation’s sanitised kirks of commerce. Customers were scarce, but there was an abundance of sales people, and those on the open concourse with their market-style stands were the most desperate of all. Years of looking away from hard men’s stares in English pubs hasn’t quite trained me well enough to avoid the lurking eye of the commission-hungry, artificially fragrant, high-heeled harpie who insists on telling you that Mrs. Pop would love this revolutionary new nail varnish.

“Why is it revolutionary? Does it make you take to the hills with an armed militia and plot the overthrow of the military-industrial complex?”

“Hey, what’s the accent? Are you from Australia?” is usually the response to that kind of comment. Training taught them to keep the smile big, but the talk must always be nice and small. It’s around this point, as they guess that you might be mildly insane, that the veneer of civil discourse starts to betray its first cracks in the sales assistant’s voice. At the same time, your presumed madness might be their best chance of a sale today, so they’ll make one last effort by halving the price.

This happened yesterday when I walked into a posh chocolate shop. Following the statutory agreement that we were both doing fine, I didn’t make an immediate grab for the shop’s most expensive items, so the saleswoman told me that Halloween goodies were two for the price of one. I bought some stuff as a salve for my girls’ football team, because they’re all mewling that they have to play on Halloween. Then the saleswoman charged me full price. “Er, didn’t you just tell me they’re two for price of one?” I asked. “Ha ha, so I did,” she laughed, almost hysterically, like she’d been saying it was just a generous offer on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t really mean it. So could you pay the full price? Pleeeease?

It wasn’t so hectic in the bigger shops, where staff are possibly less concerned about the faceless parent company going bust. The reason I actually went to the mall was to buy a roasting dish on offer in one of the department stores. I couldn’t find the one I wanted, and the only person visible was a teenage sales assistant, who ignored me because she was too busy texting. One day it will occur to American retailers to train their staff to help people, but without all the oily pushiness and naked insincerity. That day will be when we’re all up in the hills having a hell of a nice day with our armed militias.

Bigotry's Bad For Business

Extreme right US radio host Rush Limbaugh was last week pushed out of a prospective ownership group aiming to buy National Football League team the St. Louis Rams. Several black players, recalling Limbaugh’s hateful on-air race-related outbursts, said they’d never sign for a team that counted him as a part-owner. Other team owners, none of them exactly renowned for their social radicalism, balked at the idea. The league itself distanced itself from the bid, citing Limbaugh’s “controversial” remarks. And finally the bidding group’s lead investor, Dave Checketts, dropped Limbaugh, euphemistically calling him “a complication and a distraction.”

Limbaugh knew exactly where to lay the blame for all this. “This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this country,” he said, “wherever you find them, in the media, in the Democratic Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative. Therefore, this is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we’re going to have.”

I’d have nothing against a future where conservatism is destroyed. It will be a truly wonderful thing for the vast majority of the world. However, the idea that the Democratic Party or the media in their current forms could directly bring this about is as delusional as most of Limbaugh’s twisted caterwauling. The ironic thing for raving Rush is that conservatism is far more capable than either of the above two institutions at destroying itself. The NFL probably does not care about civil rights, as such. But it does care about protecting its image, and it really, really does care about losing money. The threat of a sponsors’ or a consumer boycott is easily enough to slap the league into a decent stance on facing down bigotry.

There was a similar case in the UK last week, when Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote that the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in Mallorca should not have been classified as down to “natural” causes, as stated in the coroner’s verdict (he died of heart failure), because his death followed a night on the town with his husband, they may have been smoking cannabis, and they had invited a third man back home with them. The outraged reader reaction to this unfounded, bilious, and entirely unnecessary opinionating caused several companies to pull their advertising from the Mail’s website.

In years past, the Mail would have taken pride and delight in provoking and offending so many people. Nowadays, immediate commercial pressure can force them into thinking again when they run such naked bilge. So even if odious, poison-pushing wasters like Moir and Limbaugh don’t change their views, and bleat in their next six columns or broadcasts that they’ve been deprived of their freedom to stoke the fears and prejudices of little-minded morons, at least the world won’t have to bear the publicised contents of their sickened minds.

It’s not exactly change wrung through storming the corridors of power, as visualised by generations of fist-clenching idealists. Rather it’s a lesser radicalism achieved through the exploitation of capitalism’s sensitive side, born of the belated realisation among corporations that (big surprise here), black people, gay people and left-leaning people all have money too, and they can all choose where to spend it. But before business realised that bigotry’s bad, it took years of lobbying by those heinous forces of idealism – the ones Rush probably thinks are out to destroy him - to illustrate why unfounded hatred on the grounds of gender, race or sexuality is nowadays unacceptable to those of us in the quiet majority too old and comfortable to storm the barricades, but with a molecule of power in our pockets.

Don't Walk, Part 2

You’re not going to believe this, but popping out to lunch for a bagel in suburbia can be pretty dangerous after all. Why, just today I nearly got killed for it.

I was waiting for the pedestrian light at a seven-lane highway to cross to Einstein’s Bagels, one of only three eateries in our neighbourhood within easy walking distance. When the light turns, you have about ten seconds to scurry across the seven lanes. Today, because it’s a long weekend, traffic was already heavy and hectic as everyone was trying to beat the rush to the beach. At the pedestrian signal, I took a step out to cross when a car in one of the middle lanes sped through the red light. This actually saved my life, because I instinctively took a step back to the pavement. At that second a mini-van in the closest lane also accelerated through the red light, a good three seconds after it had changed, at around 50mph. If it hadn’t killed me instantly, I can say for sure that my football career would have been over for good. But I was only hit by the rush of air.

There was a woman in the passenger seat and I saw for a split second, from very close quarters, the expression of horror on her face, and her hand raised to her mouth. I’m sure the driver didn’t mean to try and kill me, but he deliberately jumped that light to save himself a 20-second wait. Well worth risking a human life for. I then crossed the road with Mrs. Pop, who was coming to lunch with me, and we joked about how she would probably just have kept on obliviously talking about Dominic Strauss-Kahn’s possible bid for the French presidency while I was half way to Bethany Beach plastered across the front of a suburban van’s front bumper. Not to mention the irony of a whining suburban blogger dying an inglorious death on the helm of the very vehicle symbolising all that he moans about.

Einstein’s was surreal. The staff were on a go-slow, and there were a dozen patrons, silent with hunger, staring dolefully at the counter waiting for their food. There were some young, bovine-looking women wearing mismatched 60s clothing they must have chosen while severely drugged. One of them dropped a full bottle of Nantucket Nectar on the floor just as I passed her to get some serviettes. I jumped nimbly to avoid the shattered glass and the flood of fruit juice. She looked down dumbly at the mess she’d created as the overstretched counter staff reached wearily for the mop and bucket.

A minor incident, but the first one in the remaining instalment of my life.

Don't Walk

Mrs. Indie-Pop was doing something you never ought to do in suburbia – she was walking. Not that it’s dangerous in our neighborhood, unless stepping in dog shit or being overcome by depression at the sight of four SUVs in a single driveway is your idea of dangerous. It’s just something that’s seen as strange. For years my neighbours would stop and insist on offering me a lift if they saw me out and about without the requisite metal chassis on wheels. “But I’m only 100 yards from home,” I’d say. “But I’m going that way anyway,” they’d say. “But I’m only 75 yards from home,” I’d say. And they would reply that it really was no trouble, and I would say, “Thanks, but I’m actually home now, would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”

Anyway, Mrs. Indie-Pop’s car was in for service, so she took the radical step of hoofing it home from the underground, about a mile and a half away, which is the distance the average US suburban dweller accumulates on foot across the course of his or her entire adult life. Around 300 yards from home, a car pulled up beside her. She saw a balding man in his 30s talking to her, but as she had her iPod earplugs in, she couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed to be in some distress. It turned out he was saying, “What are you doing?” Like the radio had just issued a tornado watch, a Code Orange terror alert and a Walking Will Eventually Kill You health warning all in one bulletin.

“I’m walking,” she replied, keeping her distance. Because what you read in the news is true. This country is packed with freakin’ weirdoes.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” she said.

“Do you want a ride?”

It’s hard to convey through written speech, but this was not a neighbourly offer inspired by the desire to perform a worthy deed. It was a clear come-on. As though she would fancy a roadside stalker with a receding hairline enough to just hop in the passenger seat for a night of fun. She declined and continued on her way, then burst through the front door claiming, “I’ve still got it!”

Later that evening we were watching the first series of Mad Men, and I pointed out that now we were in episode ten, we really had got the message that advertising executives in the early 1960s were a bunch of boorish, chauvinist swine with absolutely no redeeming human qualities whatsoever. Mrs. Pop railed in the programme’s defence that this was a pointed reminder of what feminists had to start the struggle against. So that today women can enjoy the freedom of walking down the street without being hassled by, say, kerb-crawling scum who think that a woman alone anywhere in public must be in the need of male company.

Walk or don’t walk. In America they make the choice nice and easy.

Upholding England's Glory

Driving for long stretches around the East Midlands the past few days, I’ve noticed the principle characteristics of the English landscape remain reassuringly unchanged.

First, because England is top of its World Cup qualifying group, England jerseys are massively back in vogue, especially among fat blokes with short hair. The red away shirt, the ‘lucky’ one England was wearing when it won the World Cup in 1966, is the most popular, a good omen for when Lamps, John T and Stevie G inevitably go all the way to glory in South Africa next year.

With the spell of warm weather, though, Tubby England Fan is confronted with a dilemma. While sitting outside the pub drinking pints of lager and staring at passing drivers, does he take it off and free his lard-white, wobbly guts up for the rare chance to absorb some Vitamin D? Or will that open him up to accusations of not fully backing the lads, even though England’s next game is a couple of months away? Judging by the extremely hard looks I got, one thing is for sure - with or without the shirt, Tubby England Fan is always ready to defend his pub table, especially if you’re going past him at 35 miles per hour.

Second, a lot of the pubs are now boarded up, perhaps as many as one in every three. Worryingly, some English people are cutting back on their ale and are maybe doing yoga classes instead. Or perhaps they’re staying in to watch the DVD of the 1966 World Cup final. My picture above shows The Memory Lane in Heanor, Derbyshire. Like England, it has seen better days.

Third, it seems that any boy outside the grounds of his school, no matter what the time of day, is bound by law to be holding a polystyrene tray of chips, which he consumes vigorously and without regard to etiquette. Who says England is not planning for the future? In a few years time, he will have accumulated enough belly flab to sit outside the boozer on a hot day wearing a sweaty replica football shirt and defending his table.

Finally, all young mothers with prams and pushchairs are obliged to look like they are on the point of killing themselves. In America, young mothers walk down the street looking radiant, and smilingly invite you to stop and bestow compliments upon their shrivelled, bleating offspring. In England, they look as though they have forsaken the right to live, let alone party. They would rather be out defending their man’s pub table. Albeit with an expression of forlorn, haggard misery, English Mum has sacrificed her place at the lager taps to nurture the Johnny Bulldogs of tomorrow and ensure that England’s tri-partite heritage – alcoholism, football-based patriotism and hard stares – survives unscathed for at least another generation.

The Butcher, The Vicar And The Big Red Box

This blog is taking a temporary break from suburban Maryland and returning to its rural Lincolnshire roots. We are staying in a village where you can walk to three pubs within five minutes, and buy sausage and bacon from the butcher’s at 7.30am on the stroll home from picking up a newspaper. My cell phone is (thankfully) getting no signal, so I’m enjoying the retro thrill of using an old red phone box that smells of olde Englande’s most ancient piss and fag ends. The church rings its weary bells, there are ducks on the village stream, the pallid children attend a picturesque antique school house, and I have no doubt that in the afternoons a number of polite and elderly ladies regularly enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

It’s not quite perfect, though. I have yet to hear the genteel click of leather on willow, and I have not spotted any old maids cycling home through the mist. The former is likely drowned out by the moronic drivers who speed through the village’s narrow streets, travelling far in excess of the 30 miles per hour limit, while the last of the latter were probably run over and maimed several years ago. PC Mark Lassmans doesn’t mention the speeding in his column in the village’s admirably open quarterly magazine, but he does threaten to ticket parents who are blocking in residents on All Saints Lane when they pick up their children from the village infant school. He condemns their parking habits as being “beyond belief”. And he reminds readers of the curfew.

Yes, due to a spate of vandalism, there is a curfew on youths hanging out at the village’s two playing fields. Come dark, reportedly, they have been favoured lurking spots for under-age drinkers to by-pass Britain’s alcohol laws. Intoxication then leads to a desire to remodel the village football team’s modest main stand. PC Lassmans and PC Smith found 13 boozing youths there on the cold night of February 7, but although they took down everybody’s details, no one admitted to having ripped five steps and several chairs out of the structure. Without witnesses, there was no prosecution, and the best our law enforcement officers could do was force the youths to pour their drinks into the snow (a shameful waste, I'm almost inspired to write to the magazine).

These young folk are perhaps lacking in spiritual guidance, so the Reverend Jenny Rowley comes to the rescue in her own column, illustrated with a picture of her reassuringly jolly smile. When faced with an impossible situation (such as the All Saints church and its “ever-present financial challenge”, hint hint), then all we need to do is find strength in Jesus “and trust in his power”. Then we will find that we are “walking on water”.

Although this morning all the villagers I saw were still using the bridge to cross the village stream, I’m sure that a little bit of belief in the power of Jesus will allow PC Lassmans to come up with enough evidence to prosecute the football stand vandals, or villagers to stand in the middle of the road to face the boy racers head on, and have those cars just bounce off harmlessly to one side, their axles broken and their drivers reformed. Meanwhile, more practical villagers sitting on the Parish Council are working on a skate park to occupy the cider-swilling youths; controls on the owners of pooping dogs (a major international concern to this blog); and initiatives to plant new trees, to keep the place tidy ahead of this year’s Best Kept Village Competition, and to relocate the speed signs so that brain-shy motorists have less of an excuse for acting like they have somewhere important to go.

No one wants an English village without at least one church and a smiling vicar, but it’s not just the parking outside the infant school that’s proving beyond belief. The phone box, the pub and the butcher seem to be much more useful to the residents. “The God of the impossible calls us all to love and to trust him,” the Reverend Rowley burbles. I imagine her lurking behind the football stand and draining the dregs of the discarded lager cans before she goes to home to write her column late on a Friday night. Jesus, give me Extra Strength! she hollers to the belfry, for I love an impossible God! Oh, and as any fool staggering home from the White Hart knows, that red telephone box doubles up as the village time machine too.

Phoney War

The first law of capitalism: you are the customer, therefore you are an idiot.

In this obviously fictional sketch, there is an Idiot Customer, several Clueless Employees, and a Faceless Corporation, let’s call it AT&T. The Idiot Customer has a broken Sony Ericsson mobile phone, his second in two weeks, and is back in the AT&T shop where he bought it. Twice he has plugged it into the re-charger overnight, only twice to discover next morning that the previously functional phone has completely died. The first time, AT&T sent him a brand new one, after a long interrogation about what happened to the old one, and much messing with the broken phone in the AT&T Shop with Clueless Employee 2. Now, on the phone again to the warranty office while pacing around the AT&T shop, the Idiot Customer listens as Clueless Employee 3 offers to send him another new phone. The Idiot Customer points out that it would perhaps be a good idea to send a new re-charger as well, because the re-charger seems to be responsible in some way for knackering the phones.

[The following conversations have been heavily edited in order to reduce a one-hour phone event to a manageable length.]

Clueless Employee 3 [reading off an English-language crib sheet somewhere in The World]: I am only authorised to send you a new phone, sir.

Idiot Customer: But if you only send me a new phone, there’s every chance that the old re-charger will break the new one, and then we’re back to where we started, only now with three broken phones.

Clueless Employee 3: I am only authorised to send you a new phone, sir. If you like we can send you the new phone, and then when you receive it, you can contact us to send you a new re-charger.

Idiot Customer [incredulous]: Why not just send me the re-charger together with the phone and save us both a lot of time, effort and money?

Clueless Employee 3: I am only authorised to send you a new phone, sir.

Idiot Customer: I am standing in an AT&T shop under a big slogan that says, AT&T: Solution Provider. I want you to provide me with a solution.

Clueless Employee 3: I would like to apologise on behalf of AT&T, sir, for all the inconvenience.

Idiot Customer: I don’t want your apologies. I want a phone that works.

Clueless Employee 3: I will see what I can do and get back to you, sir.

[Idiot Customer is put on hold.]

Idiot Customer [to Clueless Employee 2]: Jesus Christ on a flying fucking motorbike.

[Clueless Employee 1 has long since ducked out of the shop, Clueless Employee 2 is ignoring him and thinking, “I wish this bastard customer would stop ranting down the phone and leave.” He’s the same Clueless Employee who was peeved two weeks ago when Idiot Customer inconveniently came in just as he was settling down to watch Barcelona versus Manchester United live on his computer. Yes dude, I’d like to be watching that game too, but I’m not because the crappy phone you sold me doesn’t work any more.]

Clueless Employee 3: On behalf of AT&T I would like to apologise for putting you on hold for such a long time, sir. I have checked in my computer, sir, and I am only authorised to send you a new phone.

Idiot Customer [sighing, and hating himself for having to deliver this line]: Can you put me through to your manager, please?

[Many more minutes of holding, apologies and repeated explanations about the probably malfunctioning re-charger later.]

Slightly Less Clueless Employee 4: We can send you a full phone kit as a special one-off courtesy, sir, but it will invalidate your warranty agreement.

Idiot Customer: I don’t care, just send it, and don’t even think about charging me for postage, and it’s no special courtesy, by the way, I’m actually trying to save you money here by not having another one of your phones break because the re-charger you sold me is faulty.

[Another ten minutes combing through the fine print. Idiot Customer isn’t really listening as he verbally signs away his rights to any future replacements. He’s mourning the loss of the good mood he was nurturing on a fine summer’s morning just one hour ago. Of the old-fart school, he still hates mobile phones and their moronic, ubiquitous intrusiveness, and wishes he didn't have to go through all this just to get back a device he wants to live without.]

Clueless Employee 4: Thank you very much for calling AT&T today. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Idiot Customer: Yes, please. Could you set about destroying your sorry excuse for a company from within, preferably today, and with the ruthless efficiency of a ravenous rogue crocodile happening upon a nest of newborn seal pups? Please?

Though the Idiot Customer only thought of saying that afterwards. Idiot.

Mockingbirds Chase The Moon

Paper Wasp Recordings, the southern Maryland-based, lo-fi micro-label for exiled British indie-pop bands, today releases a new EP by acoustic soul anti-stars Medlock. It’s previewed in its entirety here. What good fortune that the internet exists, allowing us to claim an international audience without ever having to leave the house to tour the world’s major cities, or trek to the post office with jiffy bags full of wobbly cassettes.

Waste Of Space

It’s not hard to baffle your neighbours in suburbia. Last night the woman next door seemed perplexed that I was leaving the house after 8pm, just as she was coming home with her kids. In suburbia, people only leave the house to go to work, take the kids to school, go to their kids’ sports games, or head out for brunch on Mother’s Day. None of these activities happen after 8pm.

“I’m going to see Her Space Holiday at the Rock and Roll Hotel,” I explained. She didn’t understand what that meant, so I repeated it. This time she politely pretended to understand, but pointed out that this would mean I’d miss the final of American Idol. Still I endeavoured to wrench myself away from our leafy lane.

I’ve never caught it myself, but I’ve heard there’s a bus that transports sloping white middle-aged indie saddos in to town to see bands like Her Space Holiday. Once there we stand with a glass of safety beer, not talking to each other, and wondering inside for the fiftieth time if we’re getting too old for this kind of thing. Last night the bus must have broken down, or my contemporaries have ascended to unchartered plains of mid-life enlightenment. The Rock and Roll Hotel -- DC’s best, but least known, music venue -- was teeming with young people.

Wahay, I accidentally like a band that young people like! I wondered if this was the same Her Space Holiday that for years consisted of speccy nerd Marc Bianchi making wonderful lo-fi electro records with titles like ‘Home Is Where You Hang Yourself.’ In person, yes, but in spirit, no. Now HSH is a six-piece band with two drummers, two guitarists, a bassist and a sole synth. They play peppy, self-referential rock and roll, get drunk, and enjoy themselves. I’m glad for Bianchi that he no longer wants to hang himself. Unfortunately, his songs are only half as good as they used to be, but that’s the price of happiness in indie-world.

After 40 minutes I abandon my spot on a side wall and slip out of the club, away from all these young people getting drunk and dancing. This week my eldest daughter becomes a teenager. Next time I’ll send her down instead.