Departure

This blog entry marks the 100th thing I have written about beginning with the letter D. I started with a blaze of enthusiasm a few months back, but I feel that this landmark number should be a place where I make a departure - perhaps temporary, probably temporary but possibly not - from this particular form of bloggeration. Other writing ideas are floating around my mind, but I shall leave them mysteriously swimming until they launch themselves into some kind of actual activity.

I feel that this blog entry should in some way mark the things that I have written about by looking back upon them and wondering how hindsight affects my thoughts on them, particularly the entries that were about something that was in the news at that time, so here goes.

Blog Entry 1: Democracy

I dallied with the the possibility of voting Liberal Democrats in the election, but I couldn't bring myself to put a cross in the Lib Dem box and I'm glad I didn't because I think that I'd now feel that my 'x' had been tippexed out by a compromising Clegg. I want to believe in democracy and I do, but had I followed the momentary wanderings of my heart my belief would have received a painful kick.

Blog Entry 4: The Duffalo

The scary and fearsome Duffalo, Damien Duff, met a similar fate to the wart-nosed Gruffalo - defeat. The Duffalo's defeat was at least a little less embarrassing as they lost to a pretty good footballing team: Atletico Madrid in the Europa League Final and not to a feeble lying mouse.

Blog Entry 14: Duffy, Gillian

The electoral moment that swung me back into Brown's arms was his infamous "bigot" comment directed towards Gillian Duffy. He probably wasn't right to call her it even if her views verged on bigotry. An honest debate over the subject of immigration, this was the gripe that earned her the b-word, would have been better. But, what this moment revealed to me about Brown was that he is passionate about equality. It was interesting to see Gillian sitting listening to Ed Miliband's speech the day after his victory over his brother. Her presence seemed a slightly cynical way of saying, "I'm not like that Brown bloke" and was surely a moment of spin-doctory. Perhaps I'm the cynical one though and she just fancied coming to see whether the new Labour leader thought she was a bigot too.

Blog Entry 17: Debate

My moment of standing in for the absent Labour leader in the school election proved to win very few votes for Labour as they were smashed into third place. The Lib Dems won by an absolute shedload.

Blog Entry 24: Davids (An Ode to England Internationals Called David in the Last Twenty Years)

Unless David Bentley gets a lot better quickly the England football team face the future without a David. I wondered as the World Cup sat on the horizon whether David James would be the first English David to lift the World Cup. The only previous David to have lifted the trophy was David Trezeguet for France, but England were their usual tentative and torturously bad selves and two other Davids got their hands on the World Cup instead: Villa and Silva.

Blog Entry 42: Digestive Brain

Lots of fairly reputable websites seemed to affirm the digestive brain, but when I discussed it with a Science teacher at school he acted as if I was wasting his time with quackery and I felt, without just cause I think, a little bit ashamed of myself as if I was a spreader of wild unverifiable Science nonsense. I hope that's not what I am.

Blog Entry 62: David Ngog

I made a few wild and unlikely claims in this blog entry: one: that David Ngog would scored more goals than Fernando Torres and two: that I would also score more goals that Fernando Torres. The season is only a few weeks in but Ngog's got seven, I've got four and, oh dear Fernando, Torres has only got one. The chickens are being counted nice and early.

Blog Entry 72: Deity

This blog entry sparked someone who didn't believe in God to create their own blog to write about why they disagreed with the fact that I did believe in God. The idea that people who I don't know read my blog is very exciting. His blog, which only became a blog because the comment box wasn't big enough to include his objections, wanted some verifiable proof that God existed. I told him how I believed God had answered prayers that I had prayed and suggested that he read Tim Keller's The Reason for God, but acknowledged that an element of faith is required to believe in God, although an element of faith is required to not believe in God also.

Blog Entry 95: Drusillas and the Escaped Llama

It turns out that it wasn't a llama that escaped from Drusillas, but a lemur - that makes much more sense. My friend had misheard the radio broadcast and when he gave me a subsequent call earlier this week, I started to doubt that it was a llama when he described it as red-bellied. No wonder I couldn't find anything about it online. Someone else had made a similar mistake in mishearing the obviously inarticulate radio presenter; my blog was found on Google by someone who typed in 'escaped lama drusillas'. Surely they don't cage Tibetan teachers of the Dharma at Drusillas. I apologise, that is a terrible joke about a spelling mistake.

And, so farewell for now. I will pen my thoughts on some subject or other in the future I'm sure.

Didier Drogba

He falls on the floor at the mere fluttering of a butterfly in his vicinity; I'm not too keen on his hair and he plays for the team that grates on me more than any other. Chelsea apply a cheese-grater to anything but cheese and cheese-graters need to be kept to cheese or they become very irritating. Crystal Palace should be the team that incurs my wrath the most, but their inconsistency and regular comical defeats amuse me rather than frustrate me, but the dour blue-shirted trophy-laden anti-f00tballers consume me with a rage unlike any other football team. And Mr Drogba with his histrionics and non-conformist striking ways is almost as bad as that Frank chap. I recognise that their ability is part of what angers me. If they were rubbish, I'm sure I wouldn't mind them so much.

Yet (this small three-lettered word represents a drastic mood lurch), Didier is a man to be admired in some respects. Five years ago Ivory Coast qualified for their first ever World Cup and their talismanic striker, DD who had been instrumental in their success, used the euphoric moment to bring a political shift that helped (how much help is impossible to measure) bring about peace in his homeland. As the cameras came into the changing room after the game Drogba sank to his knees and begged the warring factions in the Civil War that had been raging in the Ivory Coast for five years to lay down their arms. Within a week peace had been found and the leaders of the warring factions stood side by side at an African Nations Cup two years later in 2007, a moment when Drogba felt that Ivory Coast had been reborn.

Drogba is maligned regularly by the press and supporters - my opening rant is an example of that - and is surprising that this incredible and powerful act has not been focussed on more to bring a balance to his oddly marred reputation. He will continue to frustrate me because he doesn't need a strike partner, because he scores goals that make me unhappy, because he doesn't always seem to play fair, but more important than that is that he is a man who is passionate about peace and has made his voice heard to bring it about. That's more important than football.

Despair

I found a cool blog today: www.stuffnoonetoldme.blogspot.com and one of its cartoons (the one pictured) caused me to utter an unuttered silent smirk, but also flashed a pang of fear across me that sitting young people down in a classroom is a disastrous concept. Perhaps tomorrow I will instruct my students to run around the field screaming until they feel that their scream can be interpreted into something meaningful. Whilst despair could be a potential route this thought-path could take me down, it won't as whilst I think education makes many mistakes, I hope and think and believe that it has a power for good as well. Thank you Alex Norlega for sticking a probing finger into my mind.

Data

I was approached at work today to be part of something to do with a data-handling initiative. My phrasing is deliberately vague to match my understanding of what is required of me, but all will become clear I hope: I was sucked in by the flattering claim that youth and charisma were required for this task and I to some degree I met both criteria. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with data to be honest - at times I obsess over it to the point where it floods my dreams. One of my favourite night-time activities is to start with the number one and keep doubling it to the point where the number is too long for me to hold in my head. I also quite like inventing maths puzzles out of motorway signs. Yet, despite my soft spot for the numerical chaps, at times they infuriate and frustrate me to the point where I want to claw out my own brain.

You'll be glad that this blog entry is going to feature the more positive version of the numerically schizophrenic me and discuss the curious data behind this very blog. For the last 44 days I have had Google Analytics telling me all sorts of interesting stuff about my readership. 356 people have paid a visit to this blog since August 14th, the most visited day being a sultry Wednesday in August (24th) on a day when I chose disfigurement as my discussion topic of choice. However, it is not this subject that has prompted the most mouse clicks, but the subject deity followed closely by dugong - a serious discussion of my faith and a whimsical poem about a visit to a dugong in Australia.

The United Kingdom is unsurprisingly where most of my readership are based, but 48 different countries have taken a peek. My top ten reads: UK, USA, India, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, Poland, France, New Zealand and Canada, but it is Malaysia who linger longest, spending an average six and a half minutes perusing my ramblings. 182 regional locations are listed also with Hove topping the list and Budapest at a lowly 13.

My most favourite bit of information Google Analytics yields though is what people type into Google to find my site. 52 people have found me through a search engine. Many are attempting to find things beginning with the letter 'D' which is an odd search by someone who clearly has too much time on their hand: 17 of the 52 searches come under this category. My favourite is "ways to escape reality starting with the letter d" which is surely someone trying to look up drugs without typing in the word "drugs". They must surely have been disappointed when they arrived. The next highest search is for my own name which is very satisfying. Oh yes, in 44 days nine people have typed my name into Google, although I'm not sure they were all searching for me. There is another Dave Atherall who lives up north somewhere who rung me up once. He also has twins, but his are girls. We chatted at length about breast-feeding and other matters on the phone some time last year. Other searchings that have found my blog that please me are "rspca put a card through my door after a meddling neighbour", "dansak healthy?" and "dungarees that dangle down at the front". Surely none of these searches found what they were looking for. My one other favourite is "disadvantaged character in of mice and men" because this relates to a new controlled assessment task in the English GCSE course. I hope the students who read my ramblings about Lennie and determinism which flowed into a consideration of Phil Mitchell's inevitable tragic storyline found it helpful.

I will leave you with one last piece of data if you have stuck with me to the bitter end: people like to read me most on a Wednesday.

David Miliband

I am an older brother David who has chewed on the pill defeat.

It tasted pretty foul, I wish it was something I was never forced to eat.

I had six and bit more earth years to prepare for the battle

When Jethro was born - he posed little threat holding a rattle,

But as he grew older, the competition would start.

The battle lines were drawn over the wondrous Mario Kart.

Victories were easy over the sausage-fingered fool;

P'raps I was complacent, but life tempted me out as I finished school.

My fingers became less nimble as I found mosh pits in the city centre.

Mario and Yoshi just couldn't give me enough adventure,

But young Jethro stayed at home honing his skills

Preparing to slip me those poisonous pills

And as I rose blearily from my bed one morning

I should have been wise, should have spotted the warning,

But my pride was about to take a colossal blow

As I nonchalantly switched on the Nintendo.

Jeth's technique was sharper and more exact

While my partying in the centre had left little intact -

Victory was his and I still hang me head

And wonder if I should have stayed at home instead.

And I wonder whether David Miliband feels the same?

Does he look at himself and accept some of the blame?

Did he party too long in the political centre?

Did he neglect his roots when he stopped being a backbencher?

Younger brother Ed was left at home carefully preparing his voice

And in 2010 presented himself as a marginally better choice;

When the votes were counted he got 50.65%

And David's ego took a battering ram dent,

And as the dust settles and DM clears his head

Will he, like me, wish he stayed at home instead?

Drusillas and the Escaped Llama

Two hours ago the phone rang. Having failed to grasp the receiver and dropped it behind the television cabinet in a moment of tired oafishness, I then had to scramble amongst the furry dust to find the voice of Phillip Miles. "A llama's escaped from Drusillas Zoo," he said excitedly, "I thought you'd like to know." This titbit of interesting and obscure information was the entirety of his conversation with a brief lowdown on how the police were trailing Mr Llama included; perhaps the unusually spelt hairy one was attempting to find his or her home in the Andes. Whatever the reasons for the llama's flee, I enjoy the fact that when Phill heard this piece of news, his first thought was to contact me.

I have since trawled the internet for further details, but it seems that the incident is shrouded in secrecy with not a whiff of it on the Drusillas website or anywhere else Google has sent me.

The llamas escape, whilst perhaps just a figment of a tired nurse's imagination, has taken me back to a time a little over a year ago when my fondness for llamas came to a culmination when I took a llama for a walk. My sister had given me the birthday present of a walk with a llama and so I turned up at the Ashdown Forest Llama Park to take Toby for a stroll. There was a llama who shared my name, Dave, but the llama park worker said that our personalities were ill-suited, which seemed to me to be something of a presumption considering she had only met me moments before. What can it have been about Dave the Llama that meant that we were likely to argue? If I had taken him for a jaunt, would I have ended up with a face-full of llama phlegm? Or, was the llama park attendant misjudging both of us and would we have, in reality, got along splendidly and found that we had much in common? I will never know, but I will not complain as Toby was a perfectly adequate companion apart from an early roll around which slightly unnerved me.

Perhaps the escapee, if he is still on the loose, is looking for a llama-friendly home, a like-minded person who knows the joys of wandering through misty glens. If so, perhaps he will alight at my door in the early hours of the morn and invite me for a stroll across the South Downs. I shall sleep lightly tonight in the hope of hearing clattering hooves striding through the streets of Moulsecoomb.

Duffy, Carol Ann and Dad

I never studied poetry at school to my recollection - I'm sure I must have done, but it was so lacking in memorableness that it has completely disintegrated from my memory. Being an adult who enjoys poetry, you would assume that the child me would have had some appreciation of the form, but introductions must have always been far duller than the Liverpool transfer news which occupied my infant brain.

At A level, my English course included zero poetry, a sizeable lack in a subject which surely demands that attention be paid to it. Furthermore at university, I was given the freedom to choose the subjects of my choice and other than a tedious reading of William Wordsworth's The Prelude and a dabble into Goblin Market, my experience of poetry was again rare and meaningless to me as focused almost entirely on novels.

And so I became an English teacher without ever having engaged with a single poem. I stood before teenagers doing more learning than effective teaching, but during my three and a bit years of trying to get people to listen to me, I have fallen in love with the beauty of poetry, the wondrous delivery of meaning in short sharp intoxicating phrases. Current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is someone who I have come across because she appears on the syllabus and whilst at times I grapple uncomfortably with her refusal to hide from grimness, she without doubt often writes beautiful and effective stuff. One poem in particular, 'Before You Were Mine', inspired me to pen my own poem. She looked at a photo of her mother before she herself was born and weaved her mother's life onwards from that image. I did the same with a picture of my dad (he's the one that looks a bit like a girl in the picture that heads this blog entry) and this is what came out:

Prickly World

1969 so the back of the picture says,

Vietnam, Woodstock, Harold Wilson and hippies

and I'm not a thought yet, not a blob, not a speck

in your smiling squinting bespectacled eyes.

Long hair was your chosen statement of intent.

A purposefully fought-for freedom fuelled your dreams.

Snug-fitting knitwear was your uniform of choice,

Trying to find yourself in a dark foggy maze.

You were a boy with boy's joys,

adventure scrambling within.

But honey and a sting are a bee-keeper's world.

Alongside the nectary, innocent smile was a prickly world

with prickly truths and a prickle eleven years away called me.

A decade ensured lost to madness, narcotics, oblivion and pain

Until foetus-me knocked on your door and asked for a room.

Nothing you owed me, nothing at all,

Yet you said, 'Come on it, I've room for you in this battered renewed heart.'

I found the biological truth when I was the age of your smile.

I cried because I wanted our blood to be the same,

But what is blood? A red mess on the floor.

What is love? It's what you did when you opened that door.

Diana Ross and the Supremes

In 1963 Martin Luther King climbed onto a stage to utter words that would become a clarion call for equality for African-Americans. The winds of change were swirling, aggressively demanding justice for a people that were still living under the dark shadow of the abolished but not forgotten slavery. It was an exciting, although not a comfortable time to be an African-American. Women like Dorothy Height (previously discussed in this blog) stood not only against racism, but against sexism too, but there were also less obvious pioneers who planted a stake in the ground that would would be shaken but never moved again.

One year on from King's speech and three African-American women, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, were finding a success in the mainstream market that no one of their sex and colour had known before. 'Where Did Our Love Go?' was the first of five consecutive number ones. The second, 'Baby Love', made the number one slot in the UK as well and whilst this was their only number one outside America, their catchy motown sound achieved them a total of twelve number ones in the States, the last coming in 1969 shortly before Diana Ross' departure from the group.

I'm not sure Diana Ross and the Supremes were about making a statement about race, but that is surely what makes them such an effective statement. Ross said, "You can't just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream. You've got to go out there and make it happen for yourself," and that's what she did. She must have been aware of the potential barriers, but it seems that the Supremes clattered through them nonetheless. Other African-American all-female groups had eschewed femininity and tried to replicate the limited success that some African-American males had had, but the Supremes were proud girly girls who took to the stage in heavy make-up and elegant gowns. King was clearly a hero, but Diana and her mates are important too, if only for being a cultural phenomenon that crossed destroyed barriers by just being pretty good at what they do.

Dogs

A dog wandered past me the other day. It was a muscular black thing, the kind of dog that people purchase as intimidation devices, but this chap seemed quite friendly. Ned and Jarvis both shouted "dog" repetitively as it trundled past us unmarshalled by an owner. I wondered what I should do: I could attempt to catch the escapee, but then what next? And this would be a very tricky task to accomplish with a buggy in tow, so I did nothing, feeling like this was the only realistic course of action, and hoped that someone else would do the good deed and reunite Mr Dog with Mr Owner.

As I walked I observed the dog's antics and my heart shuddered at its recklessness as it gambolled in and out of the road with no sense of the pain that could come if a car boshed it on the conk. I don't know the end of this tale - the last I saw of the dog was when he sent his snout around a block of flats at the end of my road, but the point in it is to comment on the stupidity of dogs. Apparently you're either a dog person or cat person and being a cat person can feel uncomfortably effeminate, but these needy canines that can't venture out alone without putting their life in danger are surely inferior to those clever felines who you can take or leave at your pleasure and don't lick you into a state of extreme unhygienicness every time you walk through the door. They can keep their needy pseudo-love; the cattish aloof affection is where its at.

Discombobulation Limericks

I was standing at Brighton Station

In a state of exaltation

When I was told I was in France

By that old actor Charles Dance

Leaving me in a state of discombobulation

I woke with a discombobulated feeling

As I gazed up at my transparent ceiling

I peered into the sky

And a bird pooed in my eye

While I'd slept, the roof-lovers had been stealing

It's easy to discombobulate Ned

By telling him that blue is red

But when I mistook a blue ball

For a tasty apple

He laughed and said, "The discombobulation has spread."

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism: it's a long old word that refers to those modern buildings that look a bit like they've been designed by a child struggling to get to grips with Lego instructions and ends up creating something that looks kind of good in a peculiar way, but nothing like the original plan. It has its roots in Jacques Derrida's deconstruction theory which is a complicated concept that had me grappling for an ungraspable understanding when I was at university. Deconstruction says that texts have multiple interpretations that contradict each other, and that these interpretations are limitless, thus making the art of effective interpretation impossible.

This impossibility of finding interpretation was adopted by the world of architecture in the 1980s as designers started to produce fragmented odd looking structures. The link with Derrida's deconstruction is that rules, meaning and the observer's understanding are no longer important with artistic expression allowed to express itself in a whole new seemingly meaningless void. With beauty undefined, fresh undefined beauty was allowed to flourish.

It has its critics however, and Kenneth Frampton from Woking is one of them. He reckons that it is "elitist and detached" and it is true that ownership of such buildings is obviously beyond most people, but we all get to have a look at it don't we, even if our houses aren't likely to resemble crumpled Coke cans in the near future.

I'm personally not sure about all this deconstruction stuff - it is true that understanding of the world around us is complex and often beyond us, but we devalue the understanding that there is out there to be found if we allow ourselves to sit still in a foggy maze without at least attempting to find our way around. When we sit still and deny that meaning is important, I fear that a deconstructive approach to all art forms can be a bit pretentious and pointless, but at the same time, when we start searching and throwing off the straight-jackets of beauty, we can find fresh, invigorating wonderful things.

Disposal

Virginia Woolf, Totteham Hotspur and Richard Henry Biffa: 1882 was a good year for English literature, football and waste disposal as each crawled out of their literal or metaphorical wombs to take their place on this earth. Thirty-seven years later, as England enjoyed a respite from the First World War, the trio each started carving their own little space in history. Woolf released her first work, obscurely entitled Modern Fiction; Spurs were enjoying a season that would see them promoted to the top flight for the first time and Biffa was on the cusp of launching the business that would become a leader in the world of waste management and would obsess a small group of men in a train-spotterish way another 73 years on.

Founder of Biffa, Richard Henry Biffa had a son, Richard Frank Biffa who had a son, Richard Biffa who is the current man in charge of the Biffa empire. It is refreshing that the Biffa name wasn't chosen because of its aggressive connotations, but merely because it was a bloke's surname. There is a danger that we fulfil our names and I imagine the pre-1882 Biffas were playground bullies who graduated to become boxers. Grandad Biffa stopped the cycle of violence with his entrepreneurial venture and the succession of Biffas have seen Biffa transformed from a London-based company collecting clinker and ashes to a forward-thinking national company leading the way in waste management: "It's time to change the way we think about waste," claim the Biffa website, "to see it as a resource with real value that can be secured through recycling, recovery and the generation of energy." They certainly seem to talk the ethical talk. This is less biff and more biffy-wiffy.

As uninteresting as their waste management is, it hasn't stopped some friends of mine whipping their mobile phones out of their pockets to snap a Biffa bin/lorry/skip/worker every time they stumble across one. Their obsessive behaviour has led them to clamber inside bins and has got the most passionate of Biffa-lovers (although the rest of the group will probably claim that they deserve this crown) to get himself into a spot of bother after a company took umbrage at him sneaking around their property snapping rare Biffas. Last night I was at a party and not even my riveting conversation could keep two of these obsessives from scampering out the door when rumour of a Biffa bin up the road met their ears.

As you can probably guess, the gender of the Biffa Barmy Army are predominantly male. There seems to be something in the male psyche that is able to get disproportionately excited about something relatively meaningless. I am not immune to this, with my fondness for badgers and perhaps even this blog residing in an obsessive area of my brain, but the Biffa-love seems to take this a step further, somewhere completely outside the area of interest-value. And yet while I recognise the ridiculousity of their fetish, when I drove past a Biffa bin today, a thrill of excitement burbled somewhere within and I wondered whether their enthusiasm had infected me. We shall see.

Determinism

My sleepy drooping lesson-planning eyes have stumbled across a word beginning with D and rather than give myself the rest that I crave, I instead will stumble around my thoughts and attempt coherence on the subject. The word is determinism and it is the philosophical idea that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. There are a number of different branches to determinism, but the essential nub of it is that life is mapped out on an unalterable course. Do we have no free will in this deterministic worldview? Well, that is a complicated question with further complicated words such as libertarianism, compatibilism, incompatibilism and indeterminism all getting involved. Determinists seem to disagree on whether free will is a myth or not and a simple answer is that determinism complicates the possibility of free will.

I came across this word because it is a word that has been thrown critically in the direction of John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men, a book that has resided on the GCSE syllabus for many a year. Critics say that Lennie's fate is deterministic in that there never seems a viable alternative with Big Len careering unerringly towards his final tragic demise. I guess determinism as a criticism is something that could be thrown at many simple plots with characters often stumbling headlong into tragedy. As I tappetty-tap-tap, Phil Mitchell is slurring nonsense in a drug-induced haze in the background and this is surely also weak determinism, but the criticism is only valid if it doesn't reflect life, so do these tales bear an accurate image of life? My personal stance is that the existence of God who grants us free will creates a paradoxical situation where a determinism of sorts and free will both exist. The criticisms of Of Mice and Men, I think, are misplaced: the plot's simplicity is part of what makes it beautiful and poignant and the apparent lack of free will for the protagonists feels like an accurate reflection of the limited free will the poor and disadvantaged were given in 1930s America.

Defeat

My aging legs (in footballing terms I am reaching the twilight of my career) trotted back across the white line today as I captained CCK (Church of Christ the King) Seconds. With kick-off minutes away I was summoned hither and thither to pluck dog excrement from the grass with a plastic bag and my warmup routine became a jogging between poo treasure hunt. Once the pitch had been cleansed I walked towards the centre circle to shake stinky hands with a chap, Antony Turner, who I haven't shared conversation with for fourteen years, since we went our separate ways at the end of secondary school. His inclusion in the opposing team was slightly concerning because I remembered that he was a far better footballer than I was when at school, but perhaps time would have been kinder to me than to him. I doubted this and my doubt was a justifiable position for he headed our opponents, Montreal Arms, into a lead within two minutes.

From that moment on, our goal was peppered with shots with only brief respite when our strikers made rare forages forward, but our bluntness in attack which yielded just one shot on target during the first half was in contrast to the Montreal Arms' sharpness as they dispatched six past our stand-in goalkeeper Tim Lumgair. I rallied the troops at half-time with tales of a time when we'd come back from 5-0 down to draw 5-5 and tried to draw a crumb of comfort from the fact that the wind and the incline would be on our side in the second half.

The team kept up a wonderfully positive attitude as my words proved to be mere words, powerless to prevent our net bulging at a similarly rapid rate in the face of a breeze that was failing to cause a rustle in any local leaves. The six was quickly doubled to twelve, exceeding my previous biggest defeat of 11-0, but then a moment came which pencilled a stunning silver line around the thrash shaped cloud. After a spectacular (fortuitous and bumbling) run into MA territory from myself, the ball popped about a bit and someone kicked someone and the result was a free-kick forty (twenty-five at best) yards from goal. I'd already fluffed a free-kick in the first half and I wasn't particularly confident that I could actually reach the goal with any power, but I brushed others aside who fancied themselves from this range and stepped back for an excessive run-up. I recognised that the only chance of troubling the keeper was to boot the ball as hard as my puny legs could manage and hope for the best. I did just that and the ball flew centimetres above the grass, straight as a car that's being driven by someone whose forgotten to take the krooklok off into the bottom corner (the picture at the top of the page is the goalkeeper wrapped around the post after failing to grasp my fizzler). My celebration was undignified and embarrassing for my teammates as I whisked my shirt from my torso and performed some odd vaguely acrobatic movement which was a forward roll combined with poor attempt at a break-dancing worm.

We conceded two more, but it now felt like, as Harry Redknapp would brand it, a "great defeat", but perhaps that was just me. However, it wasn't just my goal, but our cheery manner in the face of humiliation that made it great and I guess it gives us a benchmark from which to move forwards. It also, as I'm sure you're well aware, draws me level with my nemesis Fernando Torres, who has taken four games to reach the same tally as me.

Dwain Chambers

"It was either be regular or not. There were a lot of things flying through my mind. A lot of people have said that if they'd been in my shoes they would have done the same thing. I wasn't intending to cheat the system. I just wanted to get even. I was fed up with losing. As far as I was concerned everyone else was doing it. I thought other people were doing wrong. I was losing and I thought, 'I'm not busting my arse to lose.'"

Dwain Chambers divides opinion. Frustration at consecutive defeat and a suspicion that others were cheating to win led him to a position where he willingly submitted his body to guinea pig experimentation to see if he could shave crucial milliseconds off of his 100 metre sprint time. He got caught, did the time and is now back, penitent and desirous of a clean slate to apply his running spikes to.

Whilst some are happy to see Chambers return to the track, many high-profile names such as Sebastian Coe and Kelly Holmes have spoken out against Chambers' return and the British Olympic Association agree - whilst he is allowed to run in other athletics events, the Olympics are a closed door to Dwain.

Life bans for drug cheats make for good headlines, but I feel uneasy about the unforgiving attitude of the athletics hierarchy. Part of Chambers' unpopularity is rooted in the forthright honesty with which he, perhaps unwisely, answered BBC questions in 2006, when he claimed that drugs were needed to compete. This sticky smearing of the athletics world was what caused many to abandon their mercy towards Dwain. An honest assessment is surely better than insincerity though. And surely if he has fulfilled the punishment for the crime he should be allowed to return: where is the justice in denying him? A common argument is that we need to give a clear and harsh message about drugs to youngsters, but surely a message about life being redeemable despite mistakes is an important message too, even if it isn't as headline-friendly.

Doodles

I returned to school today (I am a teacher of English) and during a day of meetings I found my pen wandering across the page whilst writing down things that I need to remember for the coming weeks ahead. I was quite pleased with the result and thought I would share it with you. It started as two brackets reminding me of meetings on Monday and Tuesday, but developed into a duojawed chap in smart attire. His name is Graham Meetingeater.

Death

I was sitting in a toilet that was not my own - this opening sounds as if I had intruded into someone else's toilet unbeknownst to them, but this was not the case: I was perfectly within my rights to be there. The toilet, as all good toilets do, had a few books on the window ledge - it also had no lock. The books were an interesting mix: Christian theology, surfing and The Brothers Karamazov (a book I read a while back after Philip Yancey claimed that it was the greatest book ever written: I thought it was alright, but I wouldn't give it quite such elevated praise).

Knowing my time would be brief, I plucked a book of quotes from Welsh Protestant minister Martin Lloyd Jones. His is a name I am familiar with, but I actually know very little about him: it turns out he was a passionate evangelical Christian who ministered at Westminster Chapel during the Second World War. The collection of quotes was alphabetised around theme and so naturally I flicked through to the letter 'D' where I found one of the more challenging subjects I have been asked to write about: death. He said something along the lines that death of the body was not something to concern yourself about in comparison with the destiny of the soul.

I didn't go any further into his thoughts on other subjects and that proved to be fortunate because my aunt opened the door mere seconds after my trousers were back around my waist.

I rejoined my extended family for our Bank Holiday gathering and thought no more about Jones' words for the moment, but the subject of death was not over for the day. About an hour and a half later I stood looking at the blank eyes of my childhood cat, Chessie, under a bar of light with my dad. Moments earlier the decision had been made to put her out of her suffering (something was hypersomething in her throat, she had a dodgy leg, was deaf and she was 93 in cat years). I had been chosen to accompany my dad because I was the least likely to cry. My dad briefly discussed the destiny of Chessie's soul. I said that she'd be able to hang out with Bootylicious, my dead bottom-wiggling rabbit, Brian, my dead long-haired guinea pig and Charlie, my dead and rather vicious gerbil. I have no idea whether that's actually true and Martin's words don't really offer anything on the matter either. Perhaps she'll be able to listen to the man she was named after (Chesney Hawkes) for all eternity, although his egocentricity would surely start to grate after a while.

I shall conclude with the lyrics of another song, one my sister Susanna used to sing about our cat when she was too young to realise that she was only brown and not brown and white:

I'm so happy,

You're so happy,

We're so happy,

My cat is brown and white.

Donkeys

I like donkeys. They briefly sat proudly at the top of my favourite animal list, but their stay was short-lived and they have since slipped down into the category of animal I am quite fond of. They share that podium with the llama, the raccoon, the orangutan, the hedgehog and the dugong, but they fail to inspire enough awe to compete with the tiger or enough personality to compete with the current number one, the badger (the badger has sat proudly at the top of the rostrum for so long now, that my badger fondness, in some circles, precedes me).

People have many questions about donkeys that they sometimes feel a little nervous to ask, so I shall now attempt to answer the ten most commonly thought, but never uttered questions about the braying beast.

1. Do donkeys kill more people a year than planes?

One expert (expertise unknown) once said that he wouldn't be surprised if donkeys killed more people than planes, but there seem to be no statistics to back up his ponderous words. This claim was first put into print by the London Times in 1987 to help people to get over their fear of flying, but it wasn't intended to be taken literally and donkey-lovers have angrily refuted it ever since.

2. How do donkeys kill people? [This ignores the previous answer that suggests that perhaps they don't]

With no one claiming to be have been killed by a donkey, it is tricky to say. Rumours have it though that they get you in a headlock and suck your brain out of your ear.

3. What's the difference between a donkey and a mule?

They are spelt differently; donkeys have one extra chromosome; a donkey has a coarser tail; a mule can jump; a mule can bear a heavier load and donkeys can breed.

4. How and why did the 'Pin the tail on the donkey' game start?

It is an odd phenomenon amongst donkeys that they are occasionally born with no tail and this lack inspired the game. Some think that the pinning of the tail was also done as a symbol to ward off evil spirits for the coming year and that is why it became a birthday party game.

5. Who is better: Eeyore out of Winnie the Pooh or the Talking Donkey out of Shrek?

This is a tough one - both have severe social problems that would make them difficult to live with, but surely Eeyore - pre-Disneyfication - is the king of the Donks.

6. Why is a female donkey called a jenny?

They seem to have acquired this name in the 1640s, but quite why is an answer I do not have. I imagine that either a wonderful woman called Jenny who loved donkeys inspired the name or a big-eared woman with an odd laugh was nicknamed Jenny. We will never know.

7. Is the only difference between a donkey and a monkey the consonant that starts their name?

There are some other differences, but it is thought that the donkey's name was in fact influenced by the monkey. The 'don' syllable was from the archaic 'dun' which means dull greyish-brown and the final syllable was added to make it sound like monkey as some sort of insult to the wannabe horse. Donkey was originally slang with ass the official term. The first written use of the term donkey wasn't until 1785, long after the term jenny.

8. Because the sound a donkey makes it spelt onomatopoeically in English (as most animal sounds are), does that mean it is spelt the same in other languages?

No. There are actually two variants in English: hee-haw and eeyore. Other language spellings include i-a i-a in Albanina, chuuchuu in Bengali, hihan in French, eselet skryter in Norweigan and asnan skriar in Swedish.

9. If you call someone a donkey, what are you suggesting about them?

My experience of the donkey insult has either been football-related in that the donkeyish football player boots the ball thoughtlessly and has no finesse about their play or is to do with the size of the male genitalia. Urban Dictionary offers a few other alternatives on top of these: donkey could mean a girl with a large rear; a bad poker player who thinks they are good; a stupid person; someone who will carry stuff around for you; a person who takes pictures of themself in the mirror; a groovy rocking amazing person; a short man who wears all black, likes Slipknot and drives a truck or someone who carries a lot of drugs around. I think I shall avoid the term to avoid confusion.

10. What alliterative name could I give my donkey?

Donkeys 'R' Us website gives a whole host of options. My top five are Dreamweaver, Dudette, Dogzilla, Detonator and Darth Vadar.

Drowning

In the last book I finished, number9dream, the main character Eiji's twin sister Anju drowned when attempting to swim out to a large rock in the middle of the sea. In my last post I discussed The Decemberists' album The Hazards of Love which tells the story of Margaret and William who both end up drowning. It got me thinking that story constructors use drowning far more commonly than it actually occurs in real life. Ophelia's suicide-drowning in Hamlet; siblings Tom and Maggie's tragic drowning in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; Compeyson's drowning at the hands of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations and Harold Bishop's suspected drowning which turned out not to be a drowning because he returned seven years later in Neighbours all spring to mind.

Theorists differ on the matter. Some say that drowning is often used because it plugs into one of our deepest fears. Others say that is is symbolic of Christian baptism and that the character drowning is on their way to a new life in eternity. I think that perhaps it is because death by drowning ensures that the person dying can retain their beauty unlike the chainsaw victim. In all the examples above, other than Compeyson, the reader/viewer would want to ponder upon the dead warmly and the drowning scenario allows us to hold an idyllic image of the departed.

Other than the ugly villain Compeyson's drowning, Harold Bishop's drowning sits the most uncomfortably with the theorists, probably because it was far more weakly plotted than the other examples. In 1990 I had watched the Bish wander hand in hand with Madge down the aisle in my assembly hall - it wasn't a wedding, just a extra-exciting assembly. A girl had won a competition to have the famous duo attend as they were appearing in the local Brighton Pantomime. I was in charge of pressing the play button on their entrance music that day and I have to say I did a pretty flawless job of pressing the button at the appropriate moment and then fading it out as they stood at the front of the hall ready to address the young crowd. I felt warmth towards this chubby chap who brought about the first of my very few brushes with celebrities in my life. But, just one year on and Madge was standing staring at the waves with no big balding head piercing the shifting surface. Hazza had drowned, yet, oh joy of joys, of terrible plots twists of terrible plot twists, he had not. Seven years on, he was back in Ramsey Street with no recollection pre-immersion. He gradually regained his memory and was integrated back into the plot of the show. His reappearance means that I shouldn't have really have discussed him in this article at all, but I allowed myself to follow the tangents of my mind and here we are.

The Decemberists

I have happened upon an album of musical wonderment. I shall tell you the journey though before I discuss the album. Recently I posted a poll on this blog asking my readership which CD I should buy. The bands all began with the letter D and were: The Dandy Warhols: Odditorium; The Decemberists: Hazards of Love; Dirty Pretty Things: Romance at Short Notice and Dinosaur Jr.: Farm. I had selected these artists by flicking through the letter D section in a record shop in Leicester and they all met the criteria of appropriate starting letter, released in the last year or two and looking like they might be my sort of thing. You see, I have allowed myself to become one of those people that only listens to music they listened to when they were a teenager. My only recent musical purchases have been new releases from bands who have been around for over half of my lifetime: Oasis: Dig Out Your Soul and Delirious: Mission Bell, and my CD purchase rate had slipped to an annual 0.29 average over the last seven years. HMV and Virgin used to be my second home, but now I content myself with the same songs that were my nightclub anthems in the days when jogging home after an evening of extravagant dancing and bone-jarring moshing until 2am wasn't an unusual occurrence.

I imagine many people are similarly stuck in a musical time warp, but I regret the fact that recent years don't have the soundtrack that my teenage years had. Certain songs evoke powerful memories: Idlewild's When I Argue I See Shapes reminds me of playing darts-cricket in my friend John Golds' bedroom; Oasis' Cigarettes and Alcohol reminds me of 16 year-old disillusionment and my parents' staircase; Richard Ashcroft's Song for the Lovers reminds me of when my friend Jason Oatway stole a poster from a nightclub and Ben and Jason's Adam and Lorraine reminds of the time my flat got burgled. The past seven years have sadly been a musical void. I think this is partly because I no longer give myself a space to listen to music in. It used to accompany my playing of computer games, but I no longer do that and my current activities are generally not conducive to extra sound. I shun music for Radio 5 discussion when I drive: I like to get angry about people's intolerant attitudes to immigration, and car music rare, my life has become tuneless.

Back to the poll which would remedy this lack; it was a dead heat with a minute to go between The Decemberists and Dinosaur Jr. My only link with either band was that when we (my family of wife Helen, and twin boys Ned and Jarvis) swapped abodes with some friends' friends this summer; the friends' friends had a framed picture from a Decemberists' show. I've never met the people that own the flat we stayed in, but their retro interior design, red fridge and decision to categorise their books not by author or genre, but by spine colour led me to the shallow conclusion that these were cool people and that anything they appreciated must also fall into the category: cool. With this in mind, I (in a slightly cheaty way) added the last vote to The Decemberists causing the vote to swing 60%-40% in their favour. A few minutes later and £5.99 had been spent and all I had to do was await the album delivery.

The album arrived yesterday and I genuinely think that even if I had widened my poll beyond the alphabetical constraints I would not have found a better, more interesting and beautiful album. The musical style is a combination of twangy acoustic dominated revelry and more grindy aggressive rumbustiousness. How do music journalists manage to keep their writing fresh when essentially they have to describe very similar guitar sounds? Music is one of the hardest things to describe. I feel I have failed to recreate what their music actually sounded like with my eccentric choice of words. I will throw into the mix that the Wikipedia author says they are "indie folk" and perhaps that will add to your imaginative recreation of them.

Fortunately it is not their music that I want to focus on primarily though, as whilst the music is at times tantalising and at times simply lovely, it is the story of the album that gripped me. Unbeknownst to me on purchase, this album is a kind of folk rock opera with the the combination of songs telling one coherent, although challenging to decipher, story. There are three vocalists voicing four main characters: Margaret, William, the Queen and the Rake. The story, in brief, goes like this: Margaret finds an injured faun which turns out to be William who is a shape-shifter (a faun by day, a man by night). They fall in love, get jiggy, get pregnant. The Queen is William's adoptive mother and she rescued him after he was abandoned in a "reedy glen". She put the shape-shifting spell on Will and she is none too happy that he has found a lover, but she agrees to let him join her for one more night. But, disaster strikes and the Rake, who has killed his three children after his wife died, abducts Margaret and the Queen, seeing this as an opportunity carries the Rake and Margaret beyond the Annan water and far away from William, but he goes in search of his beloved and manages to rescue her from the Rake, who is driven mad after being haunted by his dead children. However, they cannot recross the water and both tragically drown. It is a complex narrative to weave into seventeen songs with some of the tracks lyricless such as The Queen's Approach, forcing the listener to read the music to figure out what is happening. I love the ambition though and the lyrics are poetic and poignant: "O Margaret, the lapping waves are licking quietly at our ankles / Another bow, another breath: this brilliant chill has come to shackle".

The album is masterful, adventurous and I feel fortunate to have begun the refreshment of my music with such a great uninterrupted flow of tunes that create a genuine experience rather than an aloof detachment. It this personal inside-your-guts interaction which makes this album so special. I guess part of the reason that music has passed me by in the last few years is that it hasn't offered me anything new (I confess that I haven't searched very hard), just a recapturing of previously articulated emotions, but this album gave me a whole new musical experience. If you fancy a listen, start with The Rake's Song on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULSKZ7IP930

Deal or No Deal

In my last blog I made an offhand criticism of Deal or No Deal and received a torrent of uproarious anger at my belittlement of the show from my readership: actually one person asked, "What's wrong with Deal or No Deal?" And so I find myself critiquing the show which actually persuaded me to linger at Channel 4 a while back, but now receives a quick channel flick if I ever happen to stumble across Noel Edmonds' beardy grinning face.

"What is wrong with it?" you ask (singular). Well, it's not so much the total lack of skill required to play the game that frustrates me, but the constant personification of chance which grates. Noel champions the abandonment of mathematical probabilities and acts as if a mystical force is dictating the events inside the television studio. I don't know why this should annoy me but it does. The silent smug banker also deserves a beating. I once played the Deal or No Deal board game and the lengthy dull procedure which resulted in defeat for me further hardened my distaste for the red box lottery. Another factor is that it follows the magical Countdown, which despite its new aquamarine garish blue set design and lack of the legends Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman, still manages to be watchable and wonderful in its simplicity. This is not Deal or No Deal's fault, but the contrast highlights its turdishness in comparison to Countdown's fragrant beauty. I once got to the point of filling in an application form for Countdown, but failed to go further. Perhaps I will revisit this ambition. Anyway, I hope the original question is somewhat answered.

Perhaps it is nostalgia, but quiz shows from my childhood seem masterfully superior compared to today's twaddlesome banality (Coundown is exempt, having been around for 28 of my 30 years on earth). Here are my top five from yesteryear:

1. Going for Gold - the multicultural quiz show which involved a lot of waving.

2. Blockbusters - the simple joy of waiting for someone to say, "I'll have a P please Bob".

3. Bullseye - the regularity of failure made this show beautiful: "Here's what you could have won."

4. Supermarket Sweep - riding a trolley is one of my favourite activities and SS featured trolley mayhem aplenty.

5. The Crystal Maze - pretty much Indiana Jones featuring a bald nutty bloke (Richard O'Brien) and occasionally a weird mystical relative of his.

Disfigurement

Channel 4 at its worst shows Hollyoaks omnibuses sandwiched between Wogan's Perfect Recall and Deal or No Deal. But at its best it flits into subject matters that few dare to dabble their toe in, and they do it with a creative zest. Big Brother has for a while been tediously dull, but it started out as a fascinating social experiment. As Big Brother staggers to its death watched by a surprisingly substantial audience (4 million for Tuesday's final), Channel 4 have grabbed the headlines once more with a new show that has divided opinions. The programme under attack, due for airing around the end of this year, is Beauty and the Beast. In it two people, one with a physical disfigurement and one obsessed with beauty share a house while those who are uninterested in Holby City or Corrie watch on.

This week, on a drive to collect my trousers from the dry-cleaners (which were closed) I listened to two people fiercely debating the shows morality. The attack was that it was another 'freak show' and that it would only damage those involved. The defence was that it would challenge people's assumptions and attitudes towards those with physical disfigurements. As the arguments went back and forth I found myself frustrated with the critic who seemed to view the people with disfigurements as weak people who would never be able to handle seeing themselves in a mirror. I was already feeling that the show had potential merit when Adam Pearson's name was dropped as someone who is working on the show. Adam is a friend of friends, someone I know well enough to be his friend on Facebook, but not any more than that. Adam has a facial disfigurement and his involvement in the programme filled me with a faith that this show is not out to exploit people, but to help to create an alternative way of seeing beauty. The Five Live defendant argued that the show would make the viewer see our obsession with beauty as the real beast. I hope it does. It's got to be better than using disfigurement as a symbol for inner evil as Freddy Krueger and the James Bond films do - there didn't seem to be much criticism of those film-makers.

Dying Daffodil

There was a dying daffodil

Who whispered to me: "I have a will,

I want to leave my crinkly petals

To those pesky stinging nettles.

Then they won't cause a nasty itch

And cause poor stung ones to writhe and twitch.

My bequest will fill the world with glee,

But will ruin a brew of nettle tea."

I pondered as the daff ceased to live

And thought even stingers have something to give,

So I gave the petals to a big old oak tree

And I hope the daffodil would accept my elegy.

Dave Kitson

Dave Kitson is a frustrated man. His 5.5 million pound move to Stoke City two years ago should have been his platform into the England team, but he has struggled to score: his total of five goals in two seasons mean he has cost £1.1 million a goal discounting his wages. He now finds himself on the edge of the squad and hasn't even made the Stoke bench in the opening two games of this season, but it is not this that frustrates him - it is the iPod, or rather the effect it has on a dressing room. Of the smooth, curvy white music machines he says, "I find iPods one of the most anti-social things to have come into the changing room. Changing rooms should be buzzing with anticipation and energy before a game. But more and more I see players slumped around in their own world, generally looking miserable". It must be galling that these misery-guts trapped in a looping Radiohead (I doubt it's Radiohead) soundtrack are taking his place in the team.

It is Kitson's views that I wish to discuss rather than his football ability, for what he says perhaps shines a light on the effect of technology on culture in general. Many technologies encourage isolation rather than community: games consoles, computers and television in some ways. However, whilst some argue that they erode community, they also create a platform for a different kind of community. People play computer games across networks against each other, discuss the previous evening's television and the computer gives us chat-rooms, discussion forums and Facebook. Whilst Bookface has been accused of creating a place for unreal and inane communication rather than real and beautiful face to face stuff, it does provide people who can't get out and about with a view of the world, allows old friends to reconnect and lets me play Scrabble against people. Through Bookface I have gone to football games with two old school friends, won 60 games of Scrabble (lost 72) and been informed of various minutiae of people's lives. This weekend I met someone who I knew had spent the previous week with a sore throat that I felt far too acquainted with and this meant I didn't have to start the conversation with, "How's your week been?", but could leap straight to, "Are you feeling better?", squeezing valuable extra space for us to choose a matter to converse upon; I used it to inform him that I didn't want to see him using Bookface for any more of this self-pitying nonsense again.

I'm wandering away from the original argument I feel and straying into personal anecdotes from my weekend, so I'll stop and lurch to an inconclusive conclusion. Kitson is right, probably about the Stoke dressing room; I don't really know, but also about the wider world in many ways. Technology is crushing human interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - aaaarrgghhh. However, technology gives us avenues for a new and worthwhile kind of interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - oooooh. I shall leave it on that meaningful verbal ejaculation.

Dice

I was playing a board game (Settlers of Catan if you're interested) on Friday morning and I was in need of three consecutive rolls of the die to land with one dot pointed to the ceiling. They were long odds for sure. To do it once gives me the long odds of 6/1; to do it twice lengthens the odds to 36/1 and to do it thrice, well, the odds lurch to 216/1, yet I celebrated as a die roll of one was followed by a die roll of one and was then followed by a die roll of one. I proclaimed the skill of my dice-wielding hands while my Maths teacher opponent (Nathan Wriglesworth) almost exploded at the mathematical improbability of my success.

The precise origins of the little fellers who granted me such favour is unknown as many cultures independently created their own dice thousands of years ago and used them for a variety of purposes: dividing inheritances, choosing rulers and as a method of prediction. In ancient Roman religion it was believed that Zeus's daughter Fortuna was the controller of the dice - if that were the case, she clearly liked the way I did my hair on Friday morning.

The modern dice is a development from the use of fruit stones, sea shells and sheep ankle bones (the above picture is of children playing a game with sheep ankle bones) as providers of random progression in a game. Whilst I have often clutched dice in my sweaty paws (actually I generally demand that we use a plastic cup as a shaking implement), not everyone is a fan with some game-players scorning the random element dice bring to game, voicing the old English proverb: "The best throw of the dice is to throw them away", but I am a fan of cuboid chaps, especially when they contrive to bring me good fortune.

Distributism

Socialism or capitalism? It seems that few people are comfortable aligning themselves with either, although I have met a few people happy to wear a socialist badge. However, most seem to shun these terms, wary of the connotations and the checkered history that people baring these labels have done under these very labels. There is another label though, one that attempts to balance the practicalities of capitalism with the moral conscience of socialism: it is distributism.

Distributism doesn't deny ownership of property in the way socialism does, but at the same sees hugely wealthy individuals and monopolies controlling industry as a huge problem. Their middle-ground is that ownership of productive property (my understanding of this is that productive property includes anything that enables someone to be productive, whether it be tools, land or a computer) should be spread as widely as possible between the citizens of a nation.

In practice this would mean that people would be able to have ownership of their own company, business or simply way of providing an income without facing competition from mass corporations. I guess some sort of limiting law would have to be put into place to prevent companies expanding to non-competitive levels. The Middle Ages is seen as a time when distributism worked effectively with people earning a living through small ventures unopposed by corporate monopolies. If distributism returned to today's society, I guess huge supermarket chains would be replaced by small independent stores and companies offering computer support and services would be replaced by clever little men who understand the complexities of a motherboard - these would be amongst other shifts in our day-to-day working lives.

Distributism was formulated by Roman Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and has rather unfortunately been highjacked by the British National Party which seems an unlikely desired direction for Chesterton and Belloc. Genuine distributism doesn't seem to fit comfortably with any of the mainstream parties. David Cameron's 'Big Society' chat is perhaps the closest anything comes, but so far the practical outworkings of this don't seem to be hitting the distributism mark, not that that is what he is aiming for necessarily.

I'm not sure what I think. It sounds good: it gives people an ownership and a motivation and introduces a leveller playing field, but it is difficult to imagine Britain going in this direction. Would it be a good thing for the people on the bottom rung of society, which is always the crucial question? The answer is perhaps which is the answer to any unknown hypothetical situation I guess. I can see its strengths, but I'm not about to wear the badge.

The Dong with a Luminous Nose

Anton Green is a man of exemplary taste. The selection of writers he has referenced on his Facebook page is testimony to this: the diverse list includes the likes of travel-writer Paul Theroux, down to earth theologian Phillip Yancey, the epic George Orwell and soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. The bookshelf in his front room is a bustling thing of beauty and he also sports a tasteful beard and is the father of my good friend Ed.

So, when AG suggested a oddly titled poem by Edward Lear as a subject matter to write about, I took the suggestion seriously and went in search of the said poem. If you want to read it before I ruin its plot, it is here: http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/dln.html

The poem tells the tragic tale of the Dong's infatuation for a Jumbly Girl who sailed to his shore in a sieve with a group of other Jumblies. The Dong romanced the Jumbly Girl with his pipe while the Jumblies danced, but the day came when the Jumblies boarded their sieve once more and the Jumbly Girl's absence drove the Dong mad: "What little sense I once possessed has quite gone out of my head". In a moment of nighttime madness he wove himself a nose "of vast proportions and painted red... with a luminous lamp within suspended". The poem ends with the Dong walking the plains every night in a vain search for the Jumbly Girl. I shouldn't have expected anything less from Mr Green.

Some people like to write essays about poems; some like to sit and let them soak into their soul; I prefer to use them as trampolines into poetic invention myself. I going to pick up the Jumbly Girl's story which is unexplored by Lear as she sails away from the admiring and devastated Dong:

What Happened Next to the Jumbly Girl

The Jumbly Girl felt quite morose;

She'd never see the Dong's luminous nose.

Tears dribbled down her sky-blue cheeks

As she sailed the ocean: Zincky Flink.

Karrash: the sieve started to sink;

Her tears were adding to the sieve's numerous leaks.

The clouds above were a violent pink.

The Jumbly Girl cupped her hands round her mouth

And sung a sweet tune in the direction: south.

The melody came from the tips of her toes;

It's hard to repeat, but it went a little like this:

Burbly crumb urgalee so polotix priss

And it summoned an army of indigo crows

Who each gave the Jumbly Girl a delicate kiss.

Then they lifted the sieve up into the air

And the Jumblies cheered loudly and let off a flair,

But their joy was short-lived I'm sorry to say:

The crows grew more weary towards the end of the day

And one by one the Jumblies took a sacrificial leap,

Landing in the mouth of a hungry Crocosheep

Until the Jumbly Girl was the only Jumbly alive

And the crows put her down in the Rumblechunks' hive.

It was true that the crows had delivered her from death,

But the Rumblechunks had cauliflower breath.

They'd been chomping on the cauli for many a year

And they thought they smelt fragrant, like a sweet summer rose

But the Jumbly Girl sat in the hive holding her nose.

The Rumblechunks looked at her, gave her quite a leer

And then Rumblechunk Six did unromantically propose.

The offer from this cauli-gobbler was a bed in their abode,

A smouldering tuft of knee hair and ride on his xchimode

If she decided that smelling his cauli-exhale 'twas wrong

She would be thrown from the hive into the hole of kroogwace.

She had little choice and the wedding took place

Jumbly Girl reminisced about the fabulous Dong,

But 'twas no use, her horrible fate she must face.

Years flew by and Jumbly Girl's diet was dreary:

Cauliflower followed by cauliflower made her stomach grow queery.

Her beautiful blue skin turned white and bobbly.

Her green hair became green leaves that were flimsy and wobbly.

She lost her ability to speak or to think

To breathe or to dance, to eat or to drink

And years later the Dong visited the hive wearing a nose glove

And ate cauliflower cheese and wept for his lost (and quite tasty) love.

Doughnuts

As Steve Morrow tumbled from Paul Merson's shoulders in a moment of calamitous celebration in the wake of Arsenal's Coca-Cola Cup triumph, resulting in a broken arm for the goal-scoring Morrow, I shovelled doughnut number seventeen into my mouth. My family were at Big Jenny's house, the host given the unfortunate adjective 'Big' to differentiate her from my little sister Jenny - she wasn't overweight, just an adult. I think it was a birthday party of some sort, but my obsession with Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday competing for the non-event of the Coca-Cola Cup had sent me scuttling to a bedroom where I found a tiny television that I could watch the event on.

Every eight minutes or so I made the short trip from bedroom to front room to pick up a tasty doughnut. Now, whilst the adjective 'big' was largely inaccurate in paragraph one, the adjective 'tasty' is entirely appropriate for these doughnuts. They were the type with sharp jagged sugar attached to the outer bun, not those deficient soggy articles that come in packs of ten and have had sugar sweated onto their outer shells. The jam within was lively and lurched from the doughnut on the first bite, far superior to the congealed tasteless injection of red nothingness that is commonly the filling. Their sublime tastiness meant my journey to the plate was repeated time and time again until I felt slightly queasy and wide-eyed from my afternoon's snacking which had gone unnoticed by my parents who surely would have issued an, "I think you've had enough" warning had they been aware of my excessive consumption.

As a child I seemed to be able to consume extraordinary amounts of food. Shredded Wheat's slogan in the early 80s was, "Bet You Can't Eat Three" with their advert showing a shocked hotel staff when Ian Botham ordered a bowl of three for his morning snack, yet as a young child, on one particularly ravenous morning, I chomped my way through eighteen full-size cardboardy wheat cocoons.

Something must have been wrong with me to have taken so much food into my infant belly. Did I have worms? If I did, it was never treated and the worms trundled away unnoticed at some point, because I would never be able to achieve such eating feats nowadays although I do have a custard doughnut sitting in the kitchen that I'm going to pay a visit to when my fingers have stopped tappety-tapping, but it will just be the one.