The Politics of Dancing

Cocooned in alien smells the sofa and the cigarettes the coffee cup half empty feeling nothing only a rolling emptiness like the dull grey sky. These are the none days postscript to a life already lived. The Newspaper speaks of a world full of busy the energy of activity, anger laughter and the solemn laying on of hands giving life and liberty to objects the work of living the filling out of hours. Here there is only empty silence and the crumpled boredom of dead leaves.

The BBC seems intent on inflicting the unpleasant Mr David Starkey, representing the Dr Strangelove wing of the Tory party upon us. Question Time last week, Any Questions this week, Mr Starkey a television historian of somewhat limited range, obsessed as he is with narrative, the lives of ‘the great people,’ of the larger historical canvas he is not interested. His emotional range is however even more limited, a man wholly devoid of empathy, taken up with his own self importance, falling over himself to make ever more pompous statements. His current obsession is the poor or has he would say ‘the pour.’ The pour you see need to be put in their place, certainly disabused of the notion that they can live in the same vicinity as the middle classes or the rich, (Mr Starkey informs us that he has many friends who fall into the latter category, well bully for him!) Now, as the Americans say, I have a dog in this fight, I live in Notting Hill and have recently ceased to live on a good middle c...

Travel as much as you can, see the world. Read books, real travel is an inside job. Dance if you can, dance if you can’t. Sing if you can, sing if you can’t. Drink, but never let drink be your master, it is a great servant but a monster as a master. Learn poetry, some lines of poetry by heart, lines that have resonance for you. Remember the golden rule; do unto others as you would have done to you. Engage with the world, this means politics, but do not confuse politics with narrow partisan party politics, politics is everything and if you wish to live with others you cannot duck political engagement. And when you love, love not too well nor wisely but with reckless abandon, remember that a broken heart is the only one worth having. Finally learn to accept loss and failure, for they will come your way and success can be as great a disaster as failure

I heard that the Prime Minister Mr Cameron felt sorry that the decisions made respecting child benefit were not contained in the Conservative manifesto. Had they been contained of course, along with the increases in vat, this would have caused the loss of millions of votes and who knows how many seats. At the same time as I read this statement I witnessed a squadron of up to thirty pigs flying over Westminster bridge, all singing the hallelujah chorus at the top of their voice range.

‘ Sinemoretz, a tiny, picture postcard, village of 400 inhabitants only 10km north of Turkey, maintains Bulgaria's most beautiful beach, nestled below a high grassy buff. ’* *Let ’ s Go Eastern Europe 2002 Edition. The days in Sinemoritz are long. It is now a little after nine thirty and already an age has passed since the first stirrings of five o clock. Morning is the most wonderful time here. The sunrise can match anything the Aegean has to offer. If sufficiently awake it is well worth a visit to the beach. When the sun catches the sea on fire, when a mellow wind brushes against your cheeks, you know both that you are alive and that life holds the possibility of a certain kind of happiness. Here you are as likely to be awoken by a crowing cock and the chuckling of chickens as by the rays of sunlight that pierce thin curtains and illuminate the quite little village with it nameless streets. Streets, if the dusty little tracks can be so dignified, that sur...

Pope Benedict XVI sent an uncompromising message to the people of Britain at the start of the first papal state visit to the UK since the Reformation.But he urged Britain to maintain its respect for traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer valued or even tolerated.’ [1] Aggressive secularism, excuse me, I cannot remember the last time I saw someone carrying a placard bearing the legend Behead all those who insult Voltaire, or militant secularist’s murdering anti abortion doctors in the US, protesting outside cinemas showing Mel Gibson’s Life of Christ, whilst burning copies of the bible. This is simply pernicious nonsense, the desperate cries of a church loosing it’s influence, not least because of the proclivity of its priest to indulge in the sexual assault of young children. Even in catholic Ireland and Spain its influence is on the wane and it is this that it cannot stomach, hence this pathetic whinge as it seeks to hold on t...

So now we are to be ruled by a firm of undertakers, Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, men of little genuine compassion, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, whose windy empty rhetoric speaks only of a sour prejudice, the disdain of those who do not need the state, for the state. A government without a mandate. I listened yesterday to Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political correspondent as he smugly dismissed the prospect of widespread unrest as a consequence of the government’s draconian spending cuts. At the same time a senior policeman was warning that cutting police numbers could threaten their ability to handle the consequent unrest resulting from the government’s spending cuts, (incidentally how disgusting is this latter statement at so many levels.). Cameron, Mr nice guy, all teeth, oozing good looks and sincerity, the face of this Condemn trick, represents all that is most unpleasant in contemporary politics, the victory of PR over anything resembling substance, the ...