You’re Kraken me up

Ah, lazy bank holiday weekend, I’ve been celebrating with a substantial fried breakfast and heinous amounts of coffee. Be still, my beating heart – and it probably will. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I’ve just finished reading China Miéville’s Kraken, his most recent work of urban fantasy, you see. It’s taken me a while – I do, as I think I have said before, have a reading list as long as my arm.

I’ve talked about Miéville before in these pages, but to sum up – he’s a fantasy author with something of a cult following who writes work set primarily in an urban environment. Kraken, like his earlier works Un Lun Dun and King Rat, is set in a strange alternate fantasy version of London.

Our protagonist is Billy Harrow, a curator at the Natural History Museum. One morning, he discovers that one of the Museum’s star exhibits, a preserved giant squid in a tank, has vanished without trace. Almost immediately, Billy finds himself dragged into an utterly bizarre underworld of cults and magic, the target of a police unit dedicated to investigating weirdness, a church that worships the Kraken and a gang leader who happens to be a living tattoo. Oh, and the Apocalypse is coming. Make that Apocalypses.

What I would say marks this book out among Miéville’s work is the fun he has with it. He did have a few laughs in Un Lun Dun, but like so many adult fantasy authors who try to break into kids’ books, they came across as forced. Kraken, on the other hand, is written with a kind of 2000AD sensibility, a real sense of deliciously black humour. We are introduced to the Londonmancers, magicians who might best be described as pro-active psychogeographers. The Tattoo’s henchmen are the Knuckleheads, whose name is rather more literal than you might expect. Wati, an ally of the protagonist, is a spirit who can manifest in any statue or carving, right down to a Captain Kirk action figure. And there’s the rather disturbing question of what actually happens when you teleport a person…

For someone who’s made his name subverting the fantasy genre (he once described J R R Tolkien as “a wen on the arse of fantasy literature”), the author does get a lot of mileage out of playing with clichés. The best (and funniest) example of this might be when the foul-mouthed police magician Collingwood goes after Wati using spirits literally created out of copper stereotypes (“bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street”).

This is London fantasy in the grand tradition of Neverwhere – Miéville has acknowledged his debt to Neil Gaiman in the past, and in particular has noted the similarities between Kraken’s Goss and Subby and Neverwhere’s Croup and Vandemar. However, unlike many works of London fantasy, this one plays off the incoherence of the city – the fact that London cannot simply be summed up according to any particular mythology or structure, that it’s many different places coexisting at once, perceived in many different ways by many different people.

As a Miéville book, it’s much more lightweight than most of his other work. If it has a major fault, it’s that there is perhaps too much going on – so much is thrown in by way of crazy ideas and characters that it’s hard to track down the central core of the book. When the big revelation comes at the end, it doesn’t make you think, “Of course! Why didn’t I realise that?” so much as it makes you think, “Eh? Where did that come from?”

In short, if you’re hoping for another The City and The City, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re looking for a work of urban fantasy that’s intelligent and gripping and doesn’t take itself too seriously, then it comes highly recommended from me, for what that’s worth.

Here’s to the upcoming release of Embassytown…

Foulwell and Kingston-Upon-Railway

The suburbs are weird, aren’t they? I mean, by their very nature. Central London has long been a well-defined place. City walls, city gates, parish boundaries, main roads and the river have meant that for centuries the different places in London have been pretty clearly delineated. Granted, there’s the occasional dispute about, e.g., where the West End ends, and there are new places like Fitzrovia and Chinatown to contend with, but by and large you know where you are.

The suburbs, though, are different. You can’t really have suburbs until you have decent transport, so the area we now tend to think of as “suburbia” didn’t really exist until the 19th century. And I know I go on about the railways in London quite a lot, but the fact is that they were absolutely instrumental to the formation of Greater London.

For instance, take where I live – Colliers Wood. Where is Colliers Wood? It’s at the southern end of the Northern Line (incidentally, it’s a geographical irony that the Northern Line goes further south than any other Tube line). When was it founded? Well, basically, Colliers Wood-the-place didn’t exist until 1926, when the Tube station was opened. The area wasn’t exactly desolate and uninhabited, but this place as a whole was known as Merton. Colliers Wood was a local landmark that hadn’t existed for about fifty years when the Tube came along. Had the Underground station been named something different, I might well consider myself a resident of Merton Abbey, or Haydons Road, or Tooting-on-Tube.

The last may seem like a flight of fancy, but know this – there nearly was a suburb with an equally stupid name. When the London and Southampton Railway opened their station a little way south of the busy market town of Kingston, they planned to call it Kingston-upon-Railway. Because it sort-of served Kingston, but not quite. Good sense eventually prevailed, and it was renamed in 1869. The original Surbiton was a small village, also not-quite-served by the new station. However, the station and its railway line were very convenient for commuters, and so a town grew up around the station. The station was called Surbiton, so, inevitably, was the town around it. What if the station had been called something else? Would we even have a Surbiton today? Would we think of Kingston-upon-Railway as the main town, and Kingston-upon-Thames be relegated to the status of “Old Kingston” or some such?

I suspect a few of the suburbs, such as Hampton Wick, wouldn’t really be anything more than a theoretical concept were it not for their railway stations. Hampton Wick has little by way of a focal point other than its station. Certain other suburbs, lacking notability, were absorbed by others as the commuter towns expanded – Lonesome being a case in point, once a village in its own right and now just a part of Streatham.

And this brings me on to the strange case of Fulwell. Fulwell is one of those places that always feels as if it’s on the verge of vanishing, as I had cause to reflect when I went there for a party on Saturday. It’s quite old, its name may have derived from “foul well” (so good work on getting that renamed, I suppose). It doesn’t really have a high street to speak of – a few shops, but nothing to distinguish it from the outlying parts of Twickenham or Teddington, on whose borders it lies. Its major landmark is the bus garage, pictured above right, but that’s more of an obstacle than a focal point. There is a railway station, sure, but it’s an unmanned two-platform branch line affair in a back street. I’m not clear exactly where it begins and ends. I reckon that, were the station to be renamed, the town would cease to exist altogether, torn between Teddington and Twickenham. It’s usually at this point that a bunch of angry residents of the area post a huge rant in the comments section about how I’m wrong and stupid, so scroll down to skip straight to that.

Yet right next to Fulwell, but a short walk from the station, you have Hampton Hill – nothing but a high street really, yet nobody would dispute the validity of its existence. Damned if I understand the suburbs.

Confessions of a Blogger

Can we talk about filth for a moment? Everyone okay with that? Vicar, you okay with that? Excellent, then we’ll begin. See, I’d like to talk today about one of those oddities of British cinema, a strange and slightly embarrassing dead-end that film historians rather like to pretend never happened. Namely, the British Sex Comedy.

Sex and comedy go well together. The human attitude to sex (generally speaking) is a very paradoxical thing. We’re not supposed to talk about it, but nevertheless it’s something that goes on all the time. Most of the population are either doing it or after it, whether they’ll admit it or not. The hypocrisy and repression surrounding it have been fertile grounds for humour since, well, literature was invented. Certainly Aristophanes managed to get a few gags out of it.

The joke here would appear to revolve around fisting.

Few nations not actively under a theocracy were quite as repressed as Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, and so a culture of innuendo-laden humour developed. A fine example is the rise of the saucy seaside postcard, one of which is shown on the right. Then, of course, you got the Carry On films, whose humour was heavily reliant on innuendo and which were sometimes funny. There’s a lot of nostalgia for this sort of thing now, with the Carry On films being practically respectable.

In the 1970s, however, British cinema ran into a problem – the American money that had funded the domestic product since the 1960s dried up, and so a pressing need developed for movies that would be cheap to produce, but which would make an awful lot of money. The solution was simple – comedy was cheap and sex brought in the punters.

The result was a slew of cheap, badly-made sex comedies made by Soho-based companies that somehow managed to be neither sexy nor funny. The plot was pretty much immaterial, just so long as you could get a few aspiring actresses to get ‘em out for the lads. All that was really necessary was a setting that could be produced on the cheap. Basically, you were pushing the boat out if you filmed it beyond the edges of Greater London. If you were really lucky, you might get a derelict holiday camp or a condemned country house to play with. A common scenario, notably in the Confessions of… and Adventures of… series as well as many, many imitators, was that you would have a lovable and hideously ugly loser who would somehow be irresistable to attractive young women and… well, that was about it. Basically, invent a scenario into which naked women could be inserted and polish off the script in a day or two, we start filming Monday.

The humour, such as it was, tended to be weak innuendo and witless slapstick.  Bear in mind that this was an era when On The Buses was considered hilarious, and you’ll understand that the bar for hilarity in Britain was set pretty low.It didn’t really matter, in any case. I don’t think anyone from the 1970s to the present day has ever watched a British sex comedy for the humour.

Oddly enough, given that the majors selling point was sex, there’s something peculiarly unsexy about these films. Maybe it’s that the comedy isn’t exactly a turn-on – speeded-up footage and swannee whistles are alright for Benny Hill, but they don’t exactly say “steamy love scene.” Maybe it’s the gloomy, low-budget settings. If I were to offer my own personal suggestion, maybe it’s because they’re set in a universe in which Robin Askwith is a sex symbol.

Robin Askwith. Control yourselves, ladies.

There’s also something peculiarly tragic about watching them today. Due to the state of British cinema, these films were often able to obtain the services of actors who you’d think could do a lot better – John Le Mesurier, Windsor Davies, Charles Hawtrey. Some of them were clearly at the end of their careers and desperate for a buck - Alfie Bass in Come Play With Me being a particularly depressing example. This film is also notable for featuring Mary Millington, who would be dead of suicide two years later, and for starring and being directed by Harrison Marks, a man who never quite achieved the artistic credibility he so desperately desired. Once you know the background, it’s about the most miserable comedy ever written.

 

And yet, and yet. Despite being unutterably terrible, these films were undeniably successful. The Adventures of a Taxi Driver made more money in the UK than Taxi Driver on its release (no, I’m not the first person to make this observation). I spoke about actors ending their career with this crap – well, quite a few actually went on to become successful in more legitimate media. Robert Lindsay, Lynda Bellingham and Christopher Biggins all received an early leg-up from the dirty mac brigade. Hell, by the mid-1970s, other films were trying to imitate them. Try watching the 1974 Carry On Emmanuelle, whose dire attempts to imitate sex comedies led Barbara Windsor to turn the job down.

 

The success of these films highlights the hypocrisy I mentioned earlier – for all Mary Whitehouse and the like railed against “smut,” obviously there were enough people who disagreed with her to make these films a financially attractive proposition. In those days, it was about as explicit as you could get in the UK.

 

Such films ceased in the early 1980s, the oft-cited reason being that more explicit and better-made pornography from Europe and the States became available on home video around this time. The British cinema industry collectively decided to pretend that none of this had ever happened and the British cinema audience decided to go along with that. Aside from a few throwbacks like the dire Sex Lives of the Potato Men a few years back, the genre is deceased.

 

Or is it? Sure, the reasons for making these films no longer exist, and the chances of anything like this appearing in the mainstream cinema again are slim to nil, but I will leave you with this fact. The most successful porn star in Britain today is a Cockney chancer operating under the name of Ben Dover. Maybe the genre didn’t die. Maybe it just crossed over.

 

Anyway, I’m off to have a wash. I may never be clean again.

 

Captain Planet, you jerk.

There are certain topics of conversation that are perennial favourites around the office. What’s in the news, what books people are reading, why the tea tastes strangely chemical when I make it, you know the sort of thing. One that often comes up is nostalgia for kids’ TV from Back In The Day. A show everyone remembers from around the time Yr. Humble Chronicler was growing up is Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Pause for the recognition/reminiscence to kick in. Ah yeah, there you go.

If you aren’t familiar with the premise, basically it was that Gaia assembles a team of young people from around the world to fight pollution with the help of rings that gave them elemental powers in what would appear to be a rather literal interpretation of the Gaia Hypothesis. When things got too hot for our heroes, they could combine their powers and summon a superhero named Captain Planet, whose only weakness was pollution (following the lead of Spider-Man’s arachnophobia and Superman’s crippling vertigo). The message at the end of every episode was that, when it comes to stopping pollution, “the power is YOURS!” Although in practice, most pollution in Captain Planet’s world seemed to be caused by a few asshole supervillains, so really the power belongs to whoever has a gun.

But like so many of these cartoons that seemed wicked-awesome at the time, there are certain aspects of Captain Planet that in retrospect seem a little, how can I put this, embarrassing today. And Captain Planet had an unfortunate tendency to punch above its weight in terms of the issues it dealt with, making it extra-cringeworthy today. Let’s look at some examples, shall we?

Case Study 1: Captain Planet versus the Goiânia accident

Reality: The Goiânia accident took place in 1987 in Brazil. Two men broke into an abandoned hospital in Goiânia and took, among other things, an X-ray machine containing highly radioactive caesium. This was sold to a local scrap dealer, Devair Alves Ferreira. Ferreira, fascinated by the eerie blue glow and ignorant of the danger, took the caesium home and showed it to a number of friends and relatives. Four people, including Ferreira’s wife and six-year-old daughter, died of radiation sickness and an estimated 250 people were contaminated.

Captain Planet’s take: The episode ‘A Deadly Glow.’ In this episode, a couple of kids steal a radioactive source from, yes, a hospital. The cartoon adds a giant radioactive rock monster in a Hawaiian shirt who wants the radiation for himself for reasons I don’t quite recall. Does he eat radiation? Something like that. Also the American kid takes the piss out of a child undergoing chemotherapy.

The Message: The real enemies are negligence and ignorance. And radioactive rock monsters.

Case Study 2: Captain Planet versus The Troubles

Reality: The Troubles was a period in Northern Ireland lasting approximately from the late 1960s to the late 1990s during which there was extensive violence arising over tensions between the Catholic and Protestant communities and the question of whether Ulster should remain part of Britain or join the Republic of Ireland. The roots of the conflict go back to the early 17th century and although the Troubles are generally considered to have ended with 1998′s Good Friday Agreement, violence and tension between the communities remains.

Captain Planet’s Take: A weird rat-mutant who goes around spreading hate, again for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, is selling nuclear weapons in troubled areas of the world, including the Middle East, South Africa and Belfast. Because everyone is so blinded by hatred, they don’t realise that a nuclear bomb would actually destroy the whole of Belfast. Also their rage causes their accents to leap all over Ireland and sometimes as far as Scotland. With the help of the cancer-patient-hating American kid, however, they are able to put their differences aside and work together to stop the bomb and live in perfect har-mo-ny. At the end, the Planeteers are satisfied with the fact that they have brought about the beginning of the end of the Troubles. Look, the relevant parts of the episode can be seen here.

The Message: American money may have funded the Troubles, but American know-how will resolve them. And Catholic, Protestant and Scotsman alike can find peace and understanding.

Case Study 3: Captain Planet versus the AIDS epidemic

The reality: HIV is a disease that attacks the human immune system, transmitted via blood, semen, breast milk and vaginal fluid, which causes the condition known as AIDS. Although treatable, there is no cure and it is estimated to have killed tens of millions of people worldwide.

Captain Planet’s Take: A school’s star basketball player learns that he has been infected with HIV, probably due to the heinous amounts of needle-sharing and unprotected anal intercourse he’s been having lately (I forget whether they specified the reason, actually). That fucking rat mutant thing decides to use this to spread hate, which is a bit rich coming from something that looks like it came off a Nazi propaganda poster. Somehow, telling a bunch of kids that they can get AIDS from touching a basketball player means that the rat-man can take over the world. Fortunately, the Planeteers are able to educate everyone as to the truth, and presumably they halt the AIDS epidemic.

The Message: Too much Captain Planet makes you lose the will to live.

Case Study 4: Captain Planet vs Hitler

The Reality: If you don’t already know about Adolf Hitler, then I don’t think I can help you.

Captain Planet’s Take: A mad scientist voiced by Meg Ryan travels back in time and tries to sell an atomic weapon to a Teutonic gentleman who is basically Hitler but not quite. Having established our villain as a moustachioed German dictator of the 1940s, I don’t know why they’re so squeamish about saying “and it’s Hitler.” Anyway, the Planeteers also travel back in time and, with the help of the Allied forces and Captain Mullet, they save the day. On the way back to the present day, the mad scientist drops her notebook. Captain Planet doesn’t return for it and one of the soldiers comments that it might contain useful information.

The Message: Through his negligence, Captain Planet is responsible for the creation of the atom bomb. Every night, when he goes to sleep, he sees the faces of every Hiroshima victim burned into his soul.

Shirley Bassey ain’t singing about this one.

Yesterday I found myself in West London, White City to be precise, in the shadow of the Westway. It is, if I’m quite honest, not the most beautiful area of the city – the Westway itself has become synonymous with psychogeographical hostility, due to the way it cuts across West London like an infected wound.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about, though, although it’s not entirely unrelated, thematically speaking. From here, and indeed from many, many vantage points on this side of the city, there’s a landmark even more visible and only slightly prettier.

The rather rubbish photo to the right depicts it- the Trellick Tower. The Tower is notoriously brutal in its design and, indeed, is one of the most famous examples of Brutalist architecture in the city.

Brutalism is perhaps the ultimate expression of architectural arrogance. It is a spin-off from Modernism, which, for all its high-falutin’ idealism concerning the revolutionising of living space, has rarely worked in the real world. The architect Erno Goldfinger, who designed the Trellick Tower, summed up the aims of Modernism thus:

Whenever space is enclosed, a spatial sensation will automatically result for persons who happen to be within it.

At this point, I think I speak for us all when I say “No shit, Sherlock.” Goldfinger then adds,

It is the artist who comprehends the social requirements of his time and is able to integrate the technical potentialities in order to shape the spaces of the future.

Thus, Goldfinger (and the other Modernists) saw their duty as something more than simply to produce places for people to live and work. Their goal was nothing less than the reshaping of society through their harnessing of space. However, at this point, I would like to retort with the Da’s opinion on architecture, which he quotes from a builder he once did some work for.

For centuries, houses have been built with four walls and a pointy roof, and there’s a good reason for that.

You see, the problem with Modernist architecture is that while it was very high-minded in its conception, it was often ill-thought-out and badly-executed. I don’t think I’ll be contradicted when I say that the result, in the 1950s-70s, was the most hated architectural movement in Britain’s history. Cutting corners during construction resulted in unsafe buildings that aged poorly. In one notorious case – pictured left – the side of Ronan Point tower block in Newham collapsed following a gas explosion. Even when the buildings stayed up, they were ugly and depressing. Concrete grew damp and grimy, corridors admitted little light and sharp corners gathered dust and litter. The psychogeographical effects are summed up by Lynsey Hanley in her excellent Estates: An Intimate History:

You can’t drift easily this way around many council estates… They are too channelled, too labyrinthine to make wandering an enjoyable experience.

Indeed. If Goldfinger and co. intended to shape people, it’s not entirely clear what they intended to shape them into. Modernist housing became synonymous with crime, poverty and hopelessness.

The Trellick Tower opened for business in 1972, and within a few years had become as notorious as any other high rise council block – indeed, its prominence made it perhaps more notorious than most. It stood out for miles, compromising not one jot with its surroundings. Tales abounded of poor maintenance, robbery and rape. Goldfinger was utterly unrepentant, observing, “I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up – disgusting.” What a prick.

For many people, the ugly-bastardry of Trellick Tower demanded retribution, and a popular urban legend arose that Goldfinger was actually utterly guilt-ridden by what he had unleashed on the residents of West London and jumped to his death from the Tower’s roof. Nothing but wishful thinking.

Ian Fleming, however, took things a step further. Fleming, of course, was the author of the James Bond novels, and no fan of Brutalism. If you know the Bond canon at all, you’ll no doubt have figured what happened – Fleming decided to give Bond a greedy, cheating enemy by the name of Goldfinger. Goldfinger – the real one – was a man without humour, as you may have guessed (for instance, he was known to fire assistants for cracking jokes), and Fleming’s publishers baulked at the possibility of being sued by the architect. Fleming furiously suggested that the character be renamed “Goldprick,” and the publishers figured maybe they should just go ahead and what the hell.

Oddly enough, the Trellick Tower has had something of a revival in its reputation in recent years. Following the formation of a Residents’ Association and a number of improvements, it’s become a more desirable place to live, with flats selling for an amount reported to be “heinously large” by sources (well, Wikipedia). Its distinctive shape has given it something of an iconic stature, and it’s become weirdly accepted as part of the skyline, like an old scar. It’s even been given Grade II* listing, which I don’t think anyone saw coming back in 1972. Apart from Goldfinger, perhaps.

In the meantime, here’s this.

A Correspondent.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I’m currently in the middle of moving house. I never realised quite how much crap I own. Anyway, sadly, this means I don’t really have the time for a proper entry this Wednesday, for which I apologise.

In the meantime, however, here is a song you might like by genius Wandsworth electro-swingers the Correspondents. I think ‘What’s Happened to Soho?’ might have to be the official theme tune of this blog.

Or maybe ‘Splendid‘ by Professor Elemental should be the theme. Hmm. This may require some thought.

In Other News
Does anyone know where Oxshott is? Because I fell asleep on the train last night and ended up there.

A Moving Story

My God, comrades, the weekend I have had. You see, I’m moving house. I’m just down the road from my current place, though, so in true sitcom fashion basic continuity will be maintained.

For an awfully long time I’ve been unhappy with my current place, pictured left. It was really only supposed to be a temporary measure while I looked for somewhere more permanent and therefore I was prepared to overlook many of my doubts about the place, like the decor, the amount of space and the fact that my new housemates seemed to be kinda twats. Unfortunately, habit took hold. You know how it is – moving is such a hassle, house hunting is such a hassle, so once you’re settled in, as long as you’re not unhappy, might as well stick with it.

At first, this was all fine. I mean, I didn’t think I had very much in common with my new housemates, but that was probably because I didn’t know them. You know how it is – it takes a while to get to know someone, and when you’re living with them, that’s a whole new level of getting to know them. But after a couple of months, I came to realise that actually, no, I had nothing in common with them. These were people who considered me dangerously hedonistic for going out midweek. I don’t mean going out and getting absolutely lashed, I mean just going out and meeting friends. Although to my housemates, there wasn’t really much of a difference. Drinking at all = road to ruin.

Now, I’ve been in good houseshares and bad houseshares, and in a situation like this it’s going to be difficult to avoid it being a bad houseshare. Plan A was to really, really try to get on with them. Find interests to share. If we didn’t have any shared interests, well, find something they were interested in and pretend to like it. The problem with this idea was that they don’t seem to have any interests beyond sitting in front of the TV. There are only so many Family Guy reruns I can take before abandoning the experiment.

Well, when that fails, there’s plan B – involve them in the stuff I’m interested in. My friends are always welcoming to new folk, and I felt sure that a night out or two would turn things around. Unfortunately, I ran into exactly the same problem – my h0usemates are not interested in anything other than sitting in front of the TV. Attempts to get them to come out failed without exception.

And so the only way to avoid falling into the Bad Houseshare trap was Plan C – don’t hang out with them at all. I hate this, because in order to carry it out you have to be that one housemate who nobody ever sees. You know, the one who stays in his room all the time, only comes out a couple of times a day, you never know if he’s out or in? I hate that guy. But that’s what I ended up becoming. A sociable, outgoing guy on one side of the front door, on the other I was the weird and antisocial dude who keeps himself to himself and is probably a serial killer. Not cool, especially the serial killer part.

So when a friend living nearby mentioned that she had a room going spare in her place, which coincidentally happened to be very close to my current place, you can imagine my interest was piqued. Apart from anything else, it sounded like a match made in heaven. The room was going spare in her house and I was going spare in my place.

I had my doubts at first, though. It all seemed a bit sudden. Was I just leaping on this because it was a quick fix? Was it unwise of me to leap on this opportunity, purely for the sake of better housemates, a larger room and cheaper rent? The consensus of literally everybody I asked was “no, accept the offer, you idiot.” Well, they didn’t say “idiot.”

My present, soon-to-be-ex-housemates, had no particular objection beyond quibbling over when they would pay back the deposit. I just decided to say “fuckit” and let them keep it as the last month’s rent. To be honest, there are so many minor repairs that I’ve been meaning to get around to doing that I probably wouldn’t have got a lot of the deposit back anyway. But in turn, those repairs resulted from the fact that the landlord, in common with landlords everywhere, is a stingy bastard. So, basically, long story short, I couldn’t be arsed.

And so I’m moving things over. So close am I to the new place that it is actually easier to move everything by hand than to hire a van or even use a car. So that’s what I’m doing – carrying things over box by box, bag by bag. Nevertheless, one of my soon-to-be-ex housemates had the stones today to tell me that my room was looking very untidy, and that they’d like it if I could tidy it up before they showed it to prospective new housemates. This while I was in the middle of moving things over. What a dick.

Electrickery

I’m strangely fascinated by pseudoscience. Homeopathy, Young Earth Creationism, Scientology, all utter bollocks and yet I love hearing about them. I don’t know why. I frankly have nothing but contempt for all pseudoscience, particularly where it crosses into the realm of medicine.

Pseudoscience relies on ignorance to work its magic. You don’t understand quantum physics, do you? So when we tell you that this pendant will use quantum energy transference to resonate with your cellular integral field to reduce your risk of cancer, arthritis and diabetes, promoting weight loss, immunity to disease and essential wellbeing, you won’t know any better. You can’t say it won’t do that, so just run with this here. Only two hundred pounds to you, sir. A bargain if ever there was one.

Oftentimes, pseudoscientists work to actively promote ignorance – maybe those hoity-toity “legitimate scientists” claim to be able to understand quantum resonance, but why should you believe them? You can’t even understand what they’re talking about!

In the case of medical pseudoscience, or “quackery” as it’s more commonly known, I have particular contempt due to the emotional manipulation involved. Sure, quacks sound sympathetic, but that’s because they tell you what you want to hear. Doctors tell you cancer has no cure? Well, that just shows how callous they are, because I can cure it with simple-feng-shui-ley-line-type crap. There appears to be a concentration of toxins in your breasts, let me lay my hands on them. Even when quacks aren’t taking advantage of the desperate and incurable, they’re still emotionally manipulative. Diet and exercise are hard, wouldn’t it be far easier if you just used acupuncture to somehow, against all laws of physics, cause the fat to disappear? The worst aspect of all this is that people often reject conventional medicine in order to spend a fortune on the modern-day equivalent of a bottle of snake oil, endangering their chances of recovery and often their lives.

As quackery relies so heavily on people’s lack of scientific knowledge, it often employs whatever the latest weird and exotic science is to make suckers sit up and take notice. Potential patients may have heard of this new “magnetism,” “radiation” or whatever, but aren’t so likely to know the full range and scope of its abilities. Particularly given that many of these substances are used in legitimate medicine – radiotherapy, for instance.

For an awfully long time, the big thing was electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered in 1786 that passing electricity through a dissected frog’s leg would cause it to kick. This seemingly confirmed a popular misconception that electricity was a vital force.

Not that the quacks had been waiting for scientific confirmation, of course. James Graham (pictured below), for instance, had been convinced ever since seeing a demonstration by Benjamin Franklin in the early 1770s that electricity was worth paying attention to. He proclaimed it to be a force that “invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects.”

In 1779, he came to London and opened the Temple of Health and Hymen just off the Strand, at No. 4 Royal Terrace. This was showmanship of which P. T. Barnum would have been proud. No expense was spared. The place was filled with huge, exotic-looking machinery that promised to use electricity to blast “aetherial forces, vivifying air, and the magnetic effluvium into the whole body or any particular part of it.” Various other electrical and chemical treatments were available, including an electric bath and an electric throne.  Don’t try this at home, kids. If you fancied a takeaway, you could purchase Graham’s range of “Imperial Pills” and “Aetherial Balsams.”

If you were having a little trouble in the bedroom (cough), then you might consider a session on Graham’s notorious “Celestial Bed.” This was a large and magnetically-charged bed which vibrated, played music and released fragrances that were supposedly “aetherial” in nature (but frankly, what in the Temple wasn’t?). The unhappy couple would hand over a whopping fee of £50 and spend the night therein in the hope of relieving infertility. I suspect that any successes arising were purely coincidental.

Graham’s particular interest was matters of a sexual nature, and it certainly didn’t escape his notice that sex was a pretty good selling point. To that end, some of the most popular attractions in the Temple were the Goddesses of Health, delightful young ladies whose job was to assist Graham and to depict what physical perfection should look like. In the name of science, of course. Scantily-clad science. Rumour has it that one of the Goddesses, depicted right, would later marry into wealth, becoming Lady Emma Hamilton and later still Lord Nelson’s mistress.

The temple was, initially at least, a roaring success – so much so that within a couple of years, Graham was able to up sticks and move to fashionable Pall Mall. Alas, while Graham was a persuasive quack, he wasn’t so strong on the financial side of things, and his extravagance resulted just two years later in his having to sell up entirely.

He never quite managed to replicate the Temple’s success, and spent the rest of his days promoting ever more bizarre alternative medicines, such as being buried naked in mud and not eating for weeks at a time. He died in 1794 at the age of just forty-nine, which says a lot about the efficacy of his methods.

Fortunately, such quack electrical nonsense didn’t last long, because – oh wait, no, the belief in electricity’s mystical health-giving properties lasted until at least 1951, when the Food and Drug Administration in the USA banned the sale of electrical remedies. Hell, there are probably people even today who think you can cure impotence by electrocuting your gentleman’s prerequisites. There’s a sucker born every minute.

Not-quite-live blogging

I suppose, with this belated entry (sorry, I was drunk), I should really talk about the Royal Wedding. That’s been the big topic lately (although now Bin Laden’s dead, I suppose that’s going to take over), and it’s indisputably a “London thing.”

Actually, I wasn’t going to talk about it, because frankly what angle could I take? I’m pretty neutral on the issue as a whole. Not really excited enough to go on about how great it is, how radiant Kate looks, &c, &c, but at the same time not cynical enough to grunt about how I give them ten years or whatever. Still, it’s nice to have a bank holiday, I suppose.

It was while taking the night bus through Westminster in the small hours of Friday morning, seeing all the folk camped out with their flags and Union Jack outfits, that it hit me – I could do one of those running commentary-type things! And so here is my failed attempt at doing just that.

4.20 – Oh hey, the homeless are pretty patriotic.

4.30 – The London Eye’s been lit up in red, white and blue. That’s nice.

5.30 – I think I’ll go to bed. Set the alarm to wake me up for the actual event, though.

10.45 – Alarm goes off unnoticed.

11.10 – I wake up, go on the BBC website and begin watching.

11.13 – I don’t like William’s outfit. I just think some people can carry red off, and I don’t think he can.

11.20 – Not much happening. A hymn or something?

11.40 – Oh for God’s sake get on with it.

11.48 – ‘Jerusalem.’ Everyone likes ‘Jerusalem.’

11.50 – I notice a guy in the congregation with an amazing moustache.

11.52 – Big exciting fanfare thing and National Anthem. Can we do something about the National Anthem? It’s okay, but I just think we can do better. It’s dreary, is what I’m saying. We could replace it with ‘Jerusalem’ or something.

11.53 – Does the Queen feel awkward during the National Anthem? I think I would if everyone was singing about me, especially as the only one not singing.

11.55 – Looks like I missed the actual vows. Oh well.

12.01 – Ha, those guys have got mops on their heads. This hymn is boring and I can’t hear any of the words.

12.05 – Oop, look sharp, they’re coming out of Edward the Confessor’s shrine. Probably being told about the Illuminati and the Secret World Government.

12.06 – Why was he called “Edward the Confessor,” anyway?

12.07 – Walking down the aisle. Prince William gives a cheeky grin.

12.09 – Internet connection goes down.

12.11 – Internet connection back up. The happy couple are in a pram of some sort.

12.17 – “1902 State landau” has been said 508 times.

12.20 – They’d get there quicker if they took a car.

12.29 – I think that’s it. Wait, no, they’re at the Palace. They are at the Palace! Okay. Is that it?

12.47 – We’re looking at a balcony.

12.50 – The BBC reporters are going around talking to ordinary folks, partly to justify this immense expenditure and partly because there’s bugger-all else happening.

13.24 – Here come some planes!

13.26 – Ah, now they’re on the balcony. And can I just say how lovely it is to finally have an attractive Royal once again?

13.27 – First public kiss. Philip and Harry share a joke. A racist one? Who knows.

13.29 – Commentary from the Lancaster bomber goes wrong. If I were the reporter, I’d try to make up for it by riding a bomb into St James’ Park.

13.40 – It’s over. What’s for lunch? Something dreadful, no doubt.