AND THE WINNER IS THE ONE THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE WON

It’s almost that time again. Yes, Hollywood will soon begin to overindulge itself in a frenzy of backslapping, tearful acceptance speeches and (for the most part at least) wrong choices. Yes – the 86^th Academy Award ceremony is just around the corner. Nine films have been nominated for best picture and it seems that American Hustle appears to be the front runner.

While I’ll admit that the performances are excellent (particularly the one by Christian Bale’s toupee) can anyone tell me why this boring, overlong, pointless and distinctly underwhelming film has received all the plaudits?

Because I’m baffled.

I haven’t seen Her, Nebraska or Philomena yet, but 12 Years A Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, Captain Phillips and Gravity are all vastly superior to American Hustle.

But then the panel of voters selected for the Academy Awards have often made strange and dubious choices for the film that they consider to be the best of the year.

Yes, I admit that throughout the years of the Academy’s existence the best film has been selected – Casablanca in 1942, Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, The Godfather and The Godfather Part 2 in 1972 and 1974, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, Unforgiven in 1992 and No Country For Old Men in 2007 – but in many cases the film that should have won (whether  it's because of the political climate in the US or the stupidity of the voting panel) has often been overlooked.

The first really famous film to fall foul of this was Orson Welles’ ground breaking and notorious Citizen Kane, which tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, who rose from humble beginnings to become a wealthy, greedy and ultimately isolated and reviled human being. The film starts with a group of reporters trying to understand why Kane’s last word was “Rosebud” and from then on it’s constructed like a jigsaw puzzle, told through multiple viewpoints (many of which conflict with each other).

Its notoriety sprang from the fact that it was a thinly veiled account of the life of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who attempted (unsuccessfully) to have every print of the film burned. It was also rumoured that the film’s motif Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for his wife’s clitoris.

Welles, who had never directed a film before, claimed that he watched John Ford’s film Stagecoach thirty-seven times to prepare himself for the task ahead. Whether it was because Welles was a first time director and saw film as having no boundaries or because he approached the project with the same verve and ambition that he utilised in his stage and radio productions (most notably in his adaptation of War of the Worlds), Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as a masterpiece – it’s a brilliant firework display of a movie with Greg Tolland’s masterful use of deep focus photography and imaginative camera angles, a startling use of expressionist lighting, a literate and intelligent screenplay by Welles and Herman J Mankiewicz that used (for the first time) overlapping dialogue, and outstanding, natural performances (especially those from Joseph Cotton and Welles himself as Kane).

Welles had reportedly coaxed his cinematographer, Greg Tolland, away from John Ford after he had seen The Grapes of Wrath and so it was ironic then that he lost out to Ford’s vastly inferior How Green Is My Valley, filmed in Technicolor with everyone concerned doing terrible Welsh accents that occasionally sounded Irish (and sometimes Scottish) and with Hollywood star Walter Pidgeon, who appeared to give up on his attempted Welsh accent fifteen minutes in and revert to own American twang for the remaining hour and forty-five minutes of the film.

How Green Is My Valley is a dated, unimaginative, turgid melodrama, and was (wrongly) voted the best picture of 1941. It is now largely forgotten and shown only as a filler on daytime television schedules, but Welles’ pyrotechnical masterwork has topped Sight and Sounds poll of the best film of all time more than any other in the magazine’s history and that’s because modern cinema began with Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane was just the first of many. Down through the years of the Academy’s history mediocrity has triumphed over intelligence and originality. In 1977, Sylvester Stallone’s formulaic and predictable boxing film Rocky was up against Alan J Pakula’s All The President’s Men, a brilliant political thriller about Watergate, Sidney Lumet’s Network, a scathingly satirical attack on television exploitation and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a disturbing view of an ordinary man’s descent into madness and murder. Guess which film won? I’ll give you a clue – it’s none of the last three I just mentioned.

And don’t get me started on Martin Scorsese, who (despite being one of the most innovative and brilliant directors America has ever produced) is one of the most shamelessly overlooked directors in the history of the Academy’s existence. He has directed a feast of dynamic and original classics – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The King of Comedy, Casino, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Hugo and most recently The Wolf of Wall Street (which I think is his best film to date - with an electrifying performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, proving yet again that he is the most talented and versatile actor of his generation) – but he won his only best director Oscar for The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. It’s a great film but he should have won an Oscar for any (if not all) the films I mentioned previously. Giving him the Oscar for The Departed was a bit like giving John Wayne his best actor Oscar for his portrayal of John Wayne with a patch over his eye in True Grit when he really should have won it for his powerful and penetrating role as the revenge driven, racist Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

And I don’t care what anyone says – the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit was much better than Henry Hathaway’s original.

Martin Scorsese wasn't the first director to be ignored by the Academy. The great Alfred Hitchcock was also given the cold shoulder come Oscar time. Throughout his long and distinguished career he never once won an Oscar for best director, even though he was responsible for introducing many of the cinematic techniques we take for granted today. Remember the scene in Jaws when the boy is attacked by the shark and the camera zooms into Chief Brody's face while the background rushes away - this is now known in the film industry as the Vertigo Zoom because it was first used in Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo in order to give the audience a sense of disorientation. In Psycho he became the first director to kill off the film's major star, Debbie Reynolds, within the first thirty minutes. Psycho - for better or worse - also ushered in the genre now known as the slasher movie. He was the first to shoot a film in one take (Rope), the first to set a thriller entirely in one room (Rear Window), the first to show children being killed in a bomb blast (Sabotage), the first to have a charming psychopath as a central character (Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on Train). The magazine MovieMaker described him (quite rightly) as the most influential filmmaker of all time, but the Academy couldn't see that. Why? Because they were idiots who regarded Hitchcock's films (as they did with Steven Spielberg's until he made Schindler's List) as being too commercial to be of any worth.

But the same old story has repeated itself over and over again throughout the last thirty years or so. Apocalypse Now, possibly the greatest war film ever made, lost out in 1979 to the dire and manipulative tear-jerker Kramer vs Kramer. In 1983 the dreadful Terms of Endearment won the award instead of The Right Stuff, Phillip Kaufman’s brilliantly told story about NASAs Apollo Project. Twee, boring, politically correct Driving Miss Daisy was apparently a better film in 1989 than the superb My Left Foot. And then there was Titanic in 1997, picking up as many awards as Ben Hur, probably because it was just as boring, overlong and shit. Finally on my hit list of Oscar winners is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, A Beautiful Mind (from the usually reliable Ron Howard). It’s a vapid, empty, pointless film that tells you absolutely nothing about the person it’s about.

Ron Howard has not made many bad films, but when he does make one it's not just bad - it's mind-bogglingly terrible. Anyone who has followed this blog will know that my least favourite film of all time  is Top Gun - but thinking about it, there are two films that are worse than that steaming pile of horse manure - and they are both directed by Ron Howard. As bad as Top Gun is, it is still watchable if only for the flying sequences and if you're so drunk you can't hear any of the predictable dialogue. The two films directed by Ron Howard that I'm talking about here have got nothing going for them at all because, right from the start they were hamstrung by the very worst source material that has ever existed.

That's right, you guessed it - they are both based on books by the world's worst writer, Dan Brown, whose central character, Robert Langdon, is the most boring creation in recent fiction. I have every confidence that my wife could knit a more interesting character than Robert Langdon.

I thought the books were bad enough but the films surpassed even their level of total, mind-numbing stupidity, and I was amazed to find that the wafer-thin, zero-dimensional characters of the books were transferred to the screen with even less charisma than they had on the page.

Watching Tom Hanks as the internationally renowned (and dumbest) symbologist (a made-up profession if ever I heard one) in the world, racing around with a ridiculous haircut struggling to solve puzzles that a five year-old could have worked out before him was worse than having to stand on my head for two hours in a bucket full of shit. When I went to see the film I had this vague notion that Ron Howard would somehow improve the book, using his directorial skills to transform it into something that was, at the very least, exciting – but I was wrong, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the only way you could ever improve a Dan Brown book is by burning it.

Apparently Ron Howard is turning the latest travesty by Dan Brown, Inferno, into a movie, which is a shame as his latest release, Rush, is a truly thrilling film about the rivalry between the racing drivers James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. Inferno, on the other hand, is anything but thrilling - it's dull, unbelievable, stupid and worthless. With not even enough plot to fill a short story, the book spends most of it great length acting as a travelogue of Venice and other Italian cities. If I wanted to read a travelogue about an Italian city I would have bought a Lonely Planet travel guide because (a) it would have been better written than Dan Brown's effort, and (b) no, that's it - there is no (b).

So, I don’t like Dan Brown’s books or films made from them. I don’t like Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, Kramer vs Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy or any of the commercially driven effluence that is squeezed out of the arse of Hollywood. And I didn’t like American Hustle.

In that case, what films (in my humble opinion) should have been nominated instead of American Hustle? Well, there’s Saving Mr Banks, a beautifully told film with great performances from Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks and Colin Farrell about the problems Walt Disney had when attempting to secure the rights of Mary Poppins from Mrs PL Travers. There’s also Ron Howard's Rush, which I just mentioned. The Coen Brothers should be there with Inside Llewyn Davis, a film about a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village in the early sixties with an ending that makes you rethink everything you’ve just watched. The Frozen Ground is a true story featuring standout performances from John Cusack as a serial killer and Vanessa Hudgens (yes – her from High School Musical) as the victim that got away. Richard Curtis’ quirky time travel film About Time should have been considered. And finally there’s Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, a film that I suspected would be a cheesy, gung-ho American war film that turned out to be nothing of the sort. It’s a brutally honest and moving depiction of brotherhood and heroism in the face of overwhelming odds that tells the true story of a team of four US Navy SEALs who make the correct moral choice after a mission goes wrong in Afghanistan and end up paying for it with their lives.  

But let’s forget the Oscars now and concentrate on a film that didn’t have a hope in hell of winning any award anywhere, but what I nevertheless thought was the most entertaining and enjoyable film I had the pleasure of seeing all last year.

It’s directed by Anthony C Ferrante and features a cast of characters that are paper-thin composites of characters that have drifted in from other films.  There's little or no plot. Logic has been replaced by a lack of continuity and a total disregard for anything remotely scientific. The actors range from being mediocre to bad to terrible and the special effects are often hilariously ineffective. It starts with a pointless prologue involving a small fishing boat, a  captain wearing a silly hat and speaking in a strange accent, a dodgy Japanese businessman, a suitcase full of money, a bowl of shark-fin soup and a chase around the deck of the aforementioned small fishing boat. After the title sequence none of these things are mentioned again in the film – ever.

It's a terrible film – but, you know what – it's also brilliant because it was never meant to be taken seriously. Here's a young director working within a tight budget (and producing a film that actually does what it set out to do) with money that he'd probably borrowed from his Auntie. Sam Raimee did much the same with The Evil Dead and he went on to direct the blockbuster Spider-man. Even well-established directors with budgets running into millions can't achieve that - anyone remember the disaster that was Cleopatra?

Watching Anthony C Ferrante's film slightly pissed with a bunch of mates made it probably the funniest film experience I’ve encountered in recent years. For those of you who haven’t worked it out yet – it’s called Sharknado and it’s about some tornados coming in from the sea with – wait for it – sharks in them.

By coming up with the idea of doing a mash-up of the films Twister, Jaws and Deep Blue Sea, Anthony C Ferrante (for me at least) has proved that he is an absolute genius.

Enough said!

To all the readers of this blog - I now have my own website at www.stephen-mitchell.co.uk. Have a look if you want. The more hits I get the better.

Thanks for all your support.

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING LIKE THE TRUTH

Here’s a text I received from my wife the other day concerning our fifteen year-old son:

I asked William to wear his coat this morning. Very wet and rainy. He needed to put his blazer in a plastic bag as there was no room in his school bag. I heard him get ready, heard him with a plastic bag. I looked out of the window to find him not wearing or carrying a coat . . . he’s a little shit and should go to acting school. Apparently it’s not raining now. I just love the touch of rustling the carrier bag and carrying the plastic bag to add authenticity . . .J

I replied by saying:

That’s my boy!

To which my wife responded:

My brains - your stupidity . . . a match made in heaven. J xxx

Oh well, I suppose they do say that opposites attract. It’s strange though, that whenever William does something bad he’s my son and at all other times he’s our son. Thinking about it, however, I’ve only got myself to blame because as a teenager I was particularly adept at lying my way out of almost any situation that may have potentially resulted in feeling the back of my mother’s hand or the whack of a teacher’s cane.

I grew up in Blackpool and received my education at Highfield Secondary Modern School, where my friend Pete and I played truant on such a regular basis that we eventually came to regard it as an integral part of the school’s syllabus. I never missed the lessons that I liked – English, Art and History – but Maths, Geography and especially Religion were fair game. Religion was not what it is now – a balanced study of the world’s main theological movements and their impact on our twenty-first century multicultural society

Back in the sixties the subject of Religion was just that. We were taught nothing about Muslims or Budhists or Hindus or any of the other religions of the world because as far as the English educational system of the fifties and sixties were concerned they didn’t actually exist. Britain was in the final death throes of Empire when I started school and that meant reading the Christian Bible was compulsory.

I was already a committed atheist by the time I was fifteen and therefore saw no point in sitting through a lesson I had absolutely no interest in. Playing truant and smoking and ogling at girls on the seafront was, for me at least, a much more meaningful, educational and mind expanding experience.

I learned how to copy my mother’s handwriting and signature for the notes I would take into school the next day and how to cook up excuses and lie convincingly to teachers about why I had not attended school – one of my Aunts died three times over a period of six months, whilst the family dog was run over and killed by (in chronological order) a milk float, a motor bike, a car and finally a lorry.

Towards the end of one lunchtime break Pete and I were forced to put all our powers of deception to the test when we were seen by the headmaster on the seafront. He was in his car and was therefore able to get back to school before the afternoon lessons started, whereas we were on foot and Highfield Secondary Modern was a good hour’s walk away. There was no way we could get away with it as we had been caught (or at least seen) red-handed, and so we spent the rest of the afternoon formulating a brilliant (but simple) way of explaining why we were not in school.

The following morning we arrived at school early and went straight to the headmaster’s office and knocked on his door. It was fifteen minutes before Morning Assembly was due to start. He called us in and we stood in front of his desk feigning remorse with guilty expressions on our faces that we had practiced between us (and in front of mirrors) the night before. We knew that he had seen us on the seafront but we also knew that he couldn’t be sure if we had seen him – and that was how we played our hand.

“Excuse me, sir – but we’ve come to apologise,” I said.

“For what?”

“Well, sir, me and Pete played truant yesterday and we’re both feeling really guilty about it because we’ve never done that sort of thing before, and we thought the best thing we could do was to come and see you and admit to it and apologise to you for doing it.”

The headmaster didn’t say anything for a few moments and we thought we’d been rumbled – but then he began to smile.

“Well done lads,” he said. “Boys who play truant are weak-minded and stupid, but what you’ve just done is very brave and honest. I wish there were more boys in this school with the integrity to admit when they’ve done something wrong and I hope for your sakes that you will never consider doing something like this again.”

“No, sir,” Pete and I said in unison.

“Good. Now get yourselves off to assembly and we’ll say no more about this.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“That was genius,” said Pete as we walked down the corridor on our way to the Assembly Hall.

And indeed, it was. We had never even considered that lying and telling the truth at the same time could be as effective as just simply lying. On top of that the headmaster had told us that we had integrity – we didn’t know what integrity meant but we were sure it was a good thing.

When I got home I looked up the word integrity in the dictionary.

integrity /in’tEgriti/ nn. 1 the quality of having strong moral principles. 2 the state of being whole ðthe condition of being unified or sound in construction.

–ORIGIN ME: from Fr. intégrité or L. integritas, from integer (see INTEGER).

“We have strong moral principles and are unified and sound in construction,” I told Pete as we walked to school the next morning.

“What?”

“That’s us. That’s what integrity means – and we have it.”

“Wow,” said Pete, “I’ve never had integrity before. I hope it’s not catching.”

Despite having strong moral principles and the fact that we were unified and sound in construction we continued to play truant at any and every opportunity, thereby making us – at the very least – unified and we took unashamed pride in the authentic look of the forged signatures on the carefully written absence notes we handed in describing the funerals we had been forced to attend after another fictional relative had passed away.

Back in 2004 my wife and I lived in the village of Ramsey Mereside in Cambridgeshire and our two boys would have been aged seven and eight respectively.   William had – and still has – neat, legible handwriting – unlike his older brother Oliver who (until he started boarding school) wrote in a spider-like scrawl, made all the more difficult to understand because of the numerous and sometimes hilarious spelling mistakes.

It was therefore easy to distinguish who had written what, and so when we discovered the words

William Francis Owen

written neatly (in black permanent marker) across the newly painted wall of the bedroom they shared, we knew at once that it was William’s handiwork.

“Oliver did it,” he told us.

“But that’s your handwriting,” his mother said. “Oliver doesn’t write like that and he would have spelled it incorrectly.”

“I didn’t do,” William insisted.

“Did you do this, Oliver?” my wife asked, beginning her ruthless cross examination.

“No.”

My wife handed Oliver a piece of paper and asked him to write the words William Francis Owen on it.

He wrote:

WiLLemFRaNciSoweN
 

She then handed the paper to William and told him to do the same.

He wrote:

William Francis Owen

“That’s the same handwriting that’s on the wall,” my wife correctly pointed out.

“Oliver made me write my name on a piece of paper and then he copied it onto the wall.”

He said it with such gravitas that he was utterly believable. It was an amazing example of lying from the lips of a seven year-old, and he had done it without any formal training. I was impressed – I had not been able to attain such a convincing level of truthful untruthfulness until I was at least thirteen.

It took four hours of questioning from my wife until she eventually prised the truth out of him.

I would never have lasted that long under my wife’s relentless interrogation. She is an expert at getting the truth out of people. Political prisoners who had been remained silent after being beaten, water-boarded, deprived of sleep and had all their finger nails pulled out with pliers wouldn’t stand a chance under her simple (but effective) method of interrogation. She only has to say one word when she suspects me of lying to her and I blurt out the truth.

That word is “Really?”

It’s just a word isn’t it – and a short one at that – but by saying it in a sinister and unforgiving fashion, whilst looking at me in a questionable and mistrustful way, I’m shamed into immediately telling her the truth.

“Did you phone the bank today, Stephen?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Errrmmm, well  . . errmm – no, but I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Errrmmm, OK – I’ll do it now.”

William is now fifteen and he has far surpassed me in the art of truth bending when I was a similar age. When Pete and I were fifteen we could make the reasonably plausible believable – but William is a master of making the unbelievable totally believable.

And if you don’t believe me prepare yourself for what follows. It was a mystery that would have baffled even the great detective Sherlock Holmes, had he actually existed. I think I’ll call it The Strange Case of the Disappearing Cherry.

My daughter Jessica had baked some cakes, one of which she had saved on a plate for Oliver. They were very nice cakes – each with a glacé cherry on the top. When Oliver returned home Jessica handed him his cake which he placed carefully on the table so as not to disturb the cherry. Oliver loves glacé cherries – he would eat a whole jar of them in one sitting if we were foolish enough to let him and so he turned to thank his sister. It was a terrible mistake - he took his eyes off his cake for less than a second and when he turned back the cherry – that had been, only a moment before, gracing the perfectly risen top – had vanished.

The only other living organism in the room was William, who was sat innocently on the other side of the room watching the television.

 “I didn’t do it,” he said.

“Yes you did,” said his brother.

“You’re the only other person in the room,” remarked his sister.

“No, Oliver, don’t you remember telling me that the cherry accidentally fell into your mouth and you had to eat it?”

I don’t know how he did it, but I’ve thought of four options:

1) He moved like lightning across the room, picked up the cherry, ate it and then moved like lightning back across the room to the exact same spot he had been sat before the cherry was introduced,

2) He is secretly a genius and had found a way of overcoming Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,

3) He had taught himself how to be an illusionist and had played a cruel trick on his brother using mirrors that made it look like the cherry had vanished when actually it was still there – thus giving him the opportunity to eat the glacéd red fruit in his own sweet time,
or
4, and I think this is the most likely) he’s a little shit and should go to acting school.

“Did you eat that cherry?” my wife asked William.

“No, mum,” he replied.

“Really?”

William looked her straight in the eye and with a calm voice that showed no trace of deception or fear, replied, “No mum. I didn’t.”

That’s my boy!

 

LUSTY LASSIES

Yes - it's that time again - my favourite night of the year - Burns Night. We celebrated the 255th anniversary of the birth of The Ploughman's Poet last night with another (our fourth) successful Burns Night Supper with almost a hundred guests in that little known corner of Scotland - Saudi Arabia. Those of you who have witnessed one of these special nights will know that I always do the Address to the Lassies and this year (as well as doubling up as The Laird of Castle McMitchell) was no exception.

 

When I was asked to do my first Address four years ago I looked on the internet for some ideas on what to do and what I discovered there were a few blokes stringing together a load of old, feeble, uncomplimentary jokes about women, culminating in a gushing of sentimentality about how great they were, thereby making redundant everything they had said previously.

 

I realised almost immediately that my personality prevented me from doing the same and so I decided to write my Address as a story about mistaking Burns' beautifully romantic poem A Red Red Rose with Neil Diamond's song Red Red Wine, which is all about getting pissed on (surprisingly) red wine (which I posted on here as Robert Burns - Diamond Geezer). For the next two years I spoke about sex and love (on here amalgamated as Love - With Wings) and so now here I am again in 2014 with an edited version of my final Address to the Lassies for The Causeway Club- speaking about lust.

 

I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Four years ago my wedding anniversary fell, like it does almost every year, on the 25^th of May. But that day was a special day for another reason – it was also the day my old boss decided to have his leaving do in Bahrain. It was our fourteenth anniversary that year and I thought that because it wasn’t an important milestone (like 25 or 50) it would be OK to attend my boss’s leaving do instead of staying in with my lovely wife.

I’d already arranged a get-together with some friends that weekend to celebrate our anniversary and so rather than just tell her that I was going to Bahrain I thought it would be right and proper to ask her if she didn’t mind.

“If you want to go to Bahrain,” she told me, “you go to Bahrain.”

I had no idea that she could be so understanding.

I took the day off so that I could spend some time with her and I bought her some flowers and chocolates and then at around three in the afternoon my colleagues and I all piled into cars and we left for Bahrain, where we would all get absolutely hammered and not return back to Sara Compound until the early hours of the morning.

Now, you can call me naïve if you wish, but I’m not that good at reading the signals women give off and it wasn’t until the following morning that I fully understood, obviously after my wife had explained it to me, the schoolboy error that I’d made the day before.

When she had told me that I could go to Bahrain if I wanted to, what she had actually meant was that she didn’t want me to go to Bahrain. Now, why didn’t she just say that instead of making me think that I could go to Bahrain and confusing my standard man’s brain (which is comprised of equal parts OCD, Asperger’s and ADHD)? 

The worst thing about it is that she has never ever let me forget it, and like most women she can remember every single thing I’ve done wrong or buggered up in all the years she’s known me, and because I have inbuilt compulsion to lie and make excuses to her when things go wrong she never fails to bring up these things if an argument is not going her way.

Women have an amazing memory recall for the seemingly inconsiderate or selfish things we men have done throughout our married lives. I can barely remember what happened in the past two hours, let alone what happened four years ago and so this year I thought I’d start planning our wedding anniversary early.

I went on the internet at the start of this week to look at the prices of confectionary on Hotel Chocolat’s website but I got side-tracked when I came across an advertisement for a site that claimed that it was better than POF. I didn’t know what POF was and all I could gather from the advertisement was that POF was full of UGGOS, whilst their site was full of HOTTIES. This was illustrated by a series of mildly pornographic photographs of scantily clad, oiled-up women of various ages.

And so after doing a bit of research I discovered that POF stood for Plenty of Fish and it was an online dating site that with the help of a team of PhDs it had created the most advanced matching system in the world that can tell you what you need in a relationship and where you screwed up (without knowing it) in the past. The site doesn’t, however, actually qualify what their team of PhDs majored in – but if I were to hazard a guess they would most probably all have certificates in clairvoyance gained from the University of I Just Made It Up.

The POF dating site has been advertised on magazine covers and even in The Daily Mail. So there you have it – you now know that anything you read on the site bears no resemblance to the truth because it’s been included in the pages of The Daily Mail.

So what kind of people does POF attract?

Well, all the people on there were pretty boring and desperate so here’s one I found in the marriage seekers column of The Indian Times instead:

“Excellent Sindhi girl, MBA from Cornell University USA. Beautiful, fair, honest, humorous, happy girl from highly educated family. Seeks highly qualified professional doctor or engineer or Financier or Industrialist or Enterpreneur Sindhi or non-Sindhi boy from USA or UK or India.”

Now, there’s a girl who’s set her sights on what she considers to be the perfect man/men, although somebody should really prepare her for a life of disappointment because (as every woman knows) the perfect man doesn't exist.

The thing is – Robert Burns would have loved Plenty of Fish. It would have been perfect for him. We all know that in his time Burns was a renowned philanderer and as famous for his numerous love affairs as he was for his poetry. He was married to a lassie called Jean Armour (who bore him a total of nine children), but he is also rumoured to have wed his lover, Mary Campbell, when his first marriage began to go on the rocks.

Here’s the first verse of one of his secret poems, which he may have written around that time:

Ye jovial boys who love the joys,

The blissful joys of lovers,

Yet done avow, with dauntless brow,

When the bonny lass discovers.

I pray draw near and lend an ear

And welcome in a frater,

For I’ve lately been on quarantine,

A proven fornicator. 

The poem is called The Fornicator and a collection of these secret poems were discovered after his death (probably on a top shelf somewhere) many of which employ the frequent use of the dreaded C Word. The title of one poem in the collection is Nine Inch Will Please a Lady, and that should give you a fairly good idea of its content (and it’s one of the cleaner ones in the collection).

What the poems show is that – yes, Burns did love women – but more than anything he lusted after them. And it’s not just men that are lustful – women can also be as lustful as men, if not more so.

Back in the dark ages, when I was eighteen and there was no such thing as internet dating,  like most young single lads in the seventies, or indeed throughout the ages, I only ever thought about one thing – sex.  I was stationed at RAF Coningsby at the time and I met a girl called Patricia (not her real name) at the Saturday Night Castle Club Dance and after only one date with her I quickly realised that there was something special about her – something that made her more desirable than all the other girls I’d been out with put together. Patricia, it turned out, was every single man’s dream woman. Not only was she a rich farmer’s daughter, she was also a raving nymphomaniac.

Now, I’d like to say that Patricia and I made love all the time – but we didn’t – we just had mad sex in lots of varied and interesting places. We did it anywhere and everywhere – in fields, in woods, under hedges, on riverbanks, by bridges, on bridges, under bridges, in her house when her parents were out playing bridge, in lifts, in garages, on the back row of the cinema, on newly-polished lino floors, on threadbare carpets, on rickety chairs, in her garden, in her neighbour’s garden, in sheds, on Black and Decker workmates, in her bathroom, in her bedroom, in my room in the barrack block when my mates were out, in the back of her car in dark, secluded lay-bys (which was often awkward as her car was a mini and I kept getting my foot stuck between the gear stick and the handbrake). 

She even demanded it once while we were sitting on the couch in the living room of her house watching telly. Now, I know that’s a fairly common place to perform an act of love, for both single couples and those who are newly-married – but what added a new dimension of urgency and terror to it for me was that her mum was in the kitchen at the time cooking the evening meal.

As I said, I was young and virile then – but as you get older and then get married and get even older and have kids your wife tends to go off all that kind of stuff. Women have got a sort of sixth sense when it comes knowing what’s on a man’s mind. At the end of the night, even before my foot has laid its first step on the stairs my wife knows that I’m thinking about the possibility of sex.

“If you’re thinking about sex you can stop it right now,” she usually tells me.

How did she know?

I suppose it’s probably because I’ve fluctuated between the ages of sixteen to eighteen ever since she’s known me. But that doesn’t stop me from trying because, like most men, I was born with a recessive gene that causes involuntary carnal perseverance, which means that I can’t help myself from making the first move. And let me tell you, when you’ve been married for a few years, making the first move can be a frightening and treacherous procedure – I’m never entirely sure whether my wife will respond to my advances or just get angry with me for waking her up.

I’m fairly convinced that when the kids came along they were put on this earth solely to destroy any remaining thoughts we may have had of having uninterrupted sex for the next twenty to thirty years.

Children change everything. There is a saying (that I just made up) that getting married changes your life, but having children destroys it. I live in Saudi Arabia and things are changing here too. Only recently the Grand Mufti has allowed the formation of a women’s rugby team. Apparently they’ll be calling themselves the All-in-Blacks.

Actually I just made that up, but what I didn’t make up is the advice given in the book The Joy of Sex, which gives some interesting advice about how to be more creative when attempting to make love. I tried this but it didn’t really help at all and in retrospect I can now tell you that making a Japanese Samurai helmet out of papier mache in the bedroom was probably not want they meant by being creative. I thought I might get some ideas by watching the film Ghost but that proved to be a very expensive and exhausting experience. You can only imagine the disappointment I felt when, after forking out a hundred quid for a potter’s wheel and then having to lug it all the way upstairs to the bedroom, I discovered that watching my wife making a Greek Urn, wearing only a front-loader bra and her best big pants, did nothing for me at all.

Obviously when the book used the word creative it was alluding to the use of sex-aids, but having them in a house that has small children scampering about can lead to some rather awkward and embarrassing confrontations.

“Look Daddy, I’ve found a pink rocket in your bedroom and it goes bzzzzzzzz.”

The book also suggested that dressing up and pretending to be other people was a good way of making your love life more exciting – and I can still remember those halcyon Sunday mornings that we spent cavorting around the bedroom – me as Superman and my wife as Wonder Woman – listening to our children screaming outside the door, unable to get in because we’d coated the door handle with Vaseline.

I must admit that frolicking around the bedroom in a Superman suit was a little embarrassing for me at first, but once I’d got used to the fact that my underpants were on the outside of my trousers everything worked out just fine.

What I’m trying to say here is that its lust and love that makes the world go around and Robert Burns knew this. His collection of secret poems weren’t published until 2009 because they were considered too lusty for human consumption.

But since then many scholars of Burns have always thought there was something missing from the collection and they were indeed correct. Following the rather shocking news that an ancient document was discovered revealing that the town of Doncaster was never formally signed back to England after the Scots were driven out (which means that, to all intents and purposes, Doncaster is actually still part of Scotland), a lost secret poem was discovered in a burnt out house in Paisley (and that was on one of the better estates).

You should consider yourselves fortunate indeed because Travels With My Rodent has been granted permission by the World Federation of Burns’ Aficionados (a society that I just made up) to be the first to publish it.

It is written in the Scottish dialect, so English people may find it a little hard to follow (unless, of course, you’re from Doncaster). And so, without further ado, here it is:

Noo we can gab aw nicht abit th' weaither

Teel ye 'boot mah friends oot oan th' coast

I coods ask a lot ay bampot questions

Ur Ah coods ask whit Ah pure want tae ken

Noo rain can faa sae soft against th' windae

The sun can shine sae bricht up in th' lift

But ma father aye tauld me, "Donae make wee talk" he said,

"Come oan oot an' say what's oan yer mind"

If Ah said ye hud a bonnie body - woods ye hauld it against me

If Ah swair ye waur an angel, - woods ye treat me loch th' devil tonight

If Ah waur dyin' ay thirst - woods yer flowin' loove come quench me

If Ah said ye hud a bonnie body - woods ye hauld it against me

 

Aye, aye, aye.

At the end of the day we all love the women that we have decided to spend the rest of our lives with. We can’t live without them. I’m finding it difficult to live out here without my wife because I’ve loved her from the second I set eyes on her, and so I’ll leave you with another poem by Burns (a real one this time) that all you lusty lassies should keep in mind when your menfolk come home from a hard day’s work. It’s called Supper Is Not Ready:

The master to his lady said,

“My honey and my succour,

Oh shall we do the thing, you know,

Or shall we take our supper?”

With modest face, so full of grace,

Replied the bonny lady;

“My noble lord, do as you please,

But supper is not ready.”

NO SEX PLEASE - WE'RE AMERICAN

 My first book, a novella entitled Permanent Moments was published on the 15th December last year and it contains a revised version of one of the stories that have been posted in this blog. The story in question was called The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers and it raised a problem with the publishers because it features a scene describing two fifteen year-olds indulging in under-age sex. The reason why it caused a problem was because the publishers are American and the age of consent in the US is eighteen.


This is the front cover of the book. If you look closely at the picture in the lens of the camera

I'm the child with the long legs

 

After a few increasingly angry emails (all from me) I wrote to them explaining that the chapter takes place in Britain where the age of consent is sixteen and so if a reference to this was included I would change the age of the characters to conform to British law.

I thought that was fairly reasonable.

 

The publishers disagreed and it was at this stage that I threw my toys out of the cot and behaved in the most childish manner possible.

I told them that I was going to rewrite the second half of the chapter so that no sex at all was mentioned.

This is what I submitted to them.

 

These are the changes to the chapter ‘The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers.’

I have checked through the rules and it does fall within the requirements of the publisher.

“After line 36, I would like the word CENSORED to appear in Franklin Gothic Heavy font and in letters large enough so that the word stretches across the entire line, like this:

C E N S O R E D

Page 76 – Page 80: Remove everything from Page 76 line 37 (Pete, who was . . .) to Page 80 line 8 (the final line of the chapter) and replace it with the following:

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Unfortunately I can’t go any further with this chapter because of a caveat placed into the contract by the publisher, which I signed without reading properly and which states:

We do not permit any explicit or graphic descriptions of sexual situations featuring individuals under the age of eighteen. This does not mean that we are opposed to the characters in a story being involved in sexual situations for character development, because that does occur in real life, however, we want to make sure that all the details of the sexual situations are avoided. Avoid descriptions of the act entirely, specifically the following: kissing in a sexual manner; sexual touching; visible signs of arousal or sexual attraction; nudity of underage individuals; double entendre.

I never read contracts because I (wrongly) assume that they are sensibly written by sensible people. I am a British writer writing about British things that happened in Britain in the 1960s and aiming this British book at a British audience.

Unfortunately my publishers are American.

Because the characters in this chapter (and indeed, throughout the book) are under age and therefore still at school I was informed that I was only allowed to include a sex scene if I made the characters eighteen years old (the age of consent in the US being eighteen and not sixteen like it is in Britain). This is obviously ridiculous as the whole point of this chapter is the fact that the characters are under age. I tried to argue my case with the content evaluators, but to no avail, and they informed me with some finality that since they are US publishers “characters need to be eighteen.”

It strikes me as supremely hypocritical that a country where High School shootings are becoming more and more commonplace that a publisher would restrict the use of sex in a book because the characters are under age. If they feel that banning scenes of two under age people having sex will discourage other under age people from having sex, then, by using that same rationale, why not ban the use of guns in books, particularly guns that are being fired – at other people; surely that would discourage Americans from shooting each other on regular basis.

Recently I went to see the film Kick Ass 2, which had, unfortunately been cut by US distributors so that the film could be seen by a family audience. Every single word of bad language had been removed from the film, although, strangely, all the violence had been left in. The message that this version of the film clearly sent out, therefore, was this: It’s OK to stab someone in the eye with a sword but it’s not OK to use the word “fuck”. Also the original Kick Ass film had an under-age girl, not only stabbing people with swords but shooting them and using the word “cunt”.

These films were made in a country where, via music channels, children are exposed to soft porn disguised as pop videos; where disgraceful reality programmes such as Teen Mom – she’s a mom and a teenager, geddit – pander to an audience that’s all but dribbling into their TV dinners – but don’t worry, despite the fact that she was under age when she had sex, the network didn’t show the act that got her pregnant in the first place. It’s a country where rich criminals posing as evangelists roam the networks extorting hard earned cash from gullible poor people who are labouring under the misapprehension that God actually exists.

Ah, America, you are a land of contradictions.

Anyway, for those of you curious enough to find out what was missing from this chapter (you’ve read this far, so you must be showing at least some interest) you can read it by the going to the 25^th entry of my blog Travels With My Rodent, where the chapter originally appeared. All you need to do is type www.travelswithmyrodent.blogspot.com  into your internet browser and then search for 25: The Smell of Last Night’s Fingers.

In case you’re wondering where title of the chapter comes from, let me just say that it ends with the line “And, of course, I let him smell my fingers.”

I hope you enjoy what you find there.”

 

So there you have it – a childish, knee-jerk, reactionary rant that was inappropriate, xenophobic and pointless all at the same time.

The Content Evaluators understandably rejected it as it must have seemed plainly obvious to them that I had quite clearly gone totally insane – or worse, judging from what I’d written I had turned into that most intolerant and despicable of creatures –  a Daily Mail reader.

I eventually got over myself and rewrote the chapter using a different situation and with the ages of the characters changed to eighteen.

And do you know what?

It actually improved the story.

So what the hell do I know about anything.

This is the back cover of the book. The rather arty back-and-white photograph is actually a selfie taken on my phone.

The book is available on Amazon as both a paperback and a kindle book. The kindle book is only £2.67 (cheap).

So that's my ruthless sales pitch over.

Have a Happy New Year!