The Politics of Dancing

In Cockney rhyming slang telling lies is rendered as pork pies, shortened in everyday use to ‘porkies’ or slightly more innocent sounding ‘little piggy’s.’ In Animal farm the most memorable scene, at least the quote that everybody knows is when the pigs unveil the new slogan at Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The road to the unveiling of this slogan has been a slow but steady one, at every stage the pigs reassuring the other animals to trust them, incrementally eroding the work of liberation. I think of this process a great deal when I hear that, despite the recent sale of an NHS hospital to a private company, despite a GP surgery touting its own private business amongst its NHS patients, there is no intention of privatising the NHS. Trust us, go back to work, go back to sleep.

At the end of October the Guardian broke the following story:- ‘Prince Charles has been offered a veto over 12 government bills since 2005 Ministers sought prince's consent under secretive constitutional loophole on bills covering issues from gambling to the Olympics’* In the subsequent episode of BBC’s Question Time the panel made light of the affair, an extremely wealthy unelected individual having a veto over the legislation of a democratically elected government apparantly exiting little concern. I have heard nothing of this matter since. Last June the Prince delivered a lecture at The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford** on the topic of ‘Islam and the Environment.' The lecture was organised by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, of which the Prince is patron, to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Amongst the targets of the lecture, the theme of which was ‘that the current economic and environmental crisis is the result of a deeper crisis of the soul, ** was Galileo, whom th...

I was brought up on a council estate, a council estate in which we had a comparatively large garden, in which the streets were lined with wide grass verges and trees, across the road at the centre of the estate was the church hall. It was a place in which people knew one another, where the kids mixed and played football, either on the grass verges, the concrete area around the garages or on the local playing field, our goalkeeper incidentally was a girl. It was an estate in which neighbours talked to one another, knew one another’s business and eventually watched and waved as the wedding parties departed and occasionally the funeral corteges moved off toward the nearby crematorium. In short it was a place in which people lived their lives and who, in the privacy of their own homes, digested the large disappointments and small successes that go to make up a life. There are many unpleasant and even sinister elements in Tory ideology but few more unpleasant and indeed sinister than the...

One Art ‘The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster, Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.’ Elizabeth Bishop Yesterday I lost my leather fur lined cap. Took it off in the library then wo...

A short time ago feeling a sense of despair at the response of 'progressive' forces in the UK I asked who stood with the Syrian opposition, see blog 27/04/2011.  Well it turns out that Amnesty International does. http://vimeo.com/31547994

Yesterday was the first that felt like winter had truly arrived, cold slightly misty in the morning and with Christmas edging toward you from every direction. I have always enjoyed the Christmas period which might seem paradoxical or even hypocritical for a non-believer such as myself, but on the contrary it is the Christians who have hijacked a wonderful winter festival, as they do making 'captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’* It has always seemed to me eminently sensible in the midst of winter to have a celebration of light and colour and fire to keep the surrounding bleakness at bay. The shelves within the local stores are already stocked with Christmas wrapping paper, tinsel, lights and the range of foodstuffs associated with the Christmas holiday. Soon the Christmas lights will go on and the stores will exude Christmas music, which I for one must admit I find somewhat wearing. Walking down Portobello at any time of year you are soon swimming in a river of ...

‘David Cameron has called the ban on England's footballers wearing poppies on their kit "outrageous".’ BBC News 09/11/11 Mr Cameron’s in a froth And the Sun is seething hot And they curse the foreign crowd Who say the Poppy’s not allowed. The dead don’t care, The dead don’t care. The Radio pundit can’t believe it Who can possibly conceive it? No Englishman can hide From this blow to English pride. The dead don’t care, The dead don’t care. So we summon up our Shakespeare Stand our ground and make it clear That our courageous footballers Will wear the poppy here. The dead don’t care, The dead don’t care. http://alextalbot2024.blogspot.com/

I have now uploaded my novel, The Last Revolutionary onto my new Blogspot Alex Talbot 2024 so please follow the link. http://alextalbot2024.blogspot.com/ I intend to use 2024 to upload both longer and shorter fiction, some longer poetry and prose. So if you are intending so to do, thank you for reading me. Alex T

The farcical way in which the Church of England has responded to the ‘anti-capitalism’ camp outside Saint Paul’s has provided me with hours of amusement, this is the plot of a great comic novel, you could choose your favourite writer, I would plump for ‘plum,’ P G Woodhouse, ‘Psmith and the Archbishop’ perhaps, or then again going downmarket a Carry On film, Carry on Choristers? However perhaps the most dismal aspect of the whole affair has been the quality of the spokesperson put up by the protesters. Ideologically incoherent and politically inarticulate they present an extraordinarily dispiriting portrait of the quality of contemporary protest, certainly when set against their forebears of 1968. Their dispute with capitalism seems to boil down to a desire to see it become more humane and responsible and their ideological stance a distrust of all politics. How do you respond to this other than with a sigh and ‘yes but………………..’ Still better I suppose than nothing and the Tories have...