We Went on Holiday by Mistake

Painting not by me (you can tell because it's good) but by Venus Griffiths

A couple of years ago The Idler released one of those banged out in time for Christmas, read it on the toilet kind of books simply titled Crap Towns. As the name suggests it was basically a compendium of  the less than desirable settlements within Britain accompanied by rants that were - theoretically - amusing, but too often degenerated into former students curling their lips at chavs eating chips instead of, say, foie gras. Sunderland, where I currently hang my hat,was top three. Middlesbrough, where the Denton half of my family hale from, also managed a solid top ten placing. Without wishing to be cruel, while I could argue the case for either town, the placing wasn't particularly surprising, given that they have both become synonymous with northern England's post industrial malaise.  What was surprising was the inclusion of my mother's home town, Cleator Moor, near the bottom of the top fifty. Not that the place is particularly glamorous. It's a small, fairly workaday former industrial town in West Cumbria. I only really know two vaguely interesting facts about the place, beyond  me mam being from there. One: LS Lowery sometimes visited the area. Family legend says that the guy actually sketched me mam as she played in the street and then presented her with the drawing. When me granda John heard this he promptly interpreted it as one of the dirty mac brigade perving on children and proceeded to throw the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest popular artists in the fire with a promise that if he caught the filthy bugger lurking around his kids again he would kick seven shades out of him. I have no idea if all that is true at all, but I very much want it to be. Two: kangol hats  (Y'know, the ones that Samuel L. Jackson wore circa Jackie Brown) were originally made there. Oh, and Three: The town experienced sectarian riots in 1871. So that's three facts about Cleator Moor I know, which isn't, I admit, much of a rebuttal to any accusations of crapness (especially when one of the facts I've offered up is historical religious bigotry).

What I would argue is a tick in the pro Cleator column is the town's setting. The lake district is one of the more beautiful parts of this country. As a kid I never really appreciated it, associating it with long drives, pissing down rain and me grandma's pathological desire to feed me and my siblings with as much stodge as possible. Now, as an adult, I've a much more developed feel of what a special place it is. Mountain, sky and water form a landscape that is serene yet dramatic, natural yet otherworldly. Or, to paraphrase Billy Connolly describing the similarly pretty Scottish Highlands to his children: Sky! Mountains! Nice! Now repeat after me: Ooh! Aaah! Nice!

Me and the better half took advantage of the weather and time off work to visit Keswick mid week. If you've never been it's a postcard pretty town on the Derwent Water and surrounded on all sides by hills and mountains, very touristy, but small enough that it's not obnoxiously so. A very lovely time was spent walking the area and exploring the various shops, museums and galleries in the town. It was not without cost however. My girlfriend, not as given to tromping round as me, ended up with mangled and blistered feet. But we've spoken with the country's top doctors and she will be walking again in time for charity run in a couple of weeks.

The William Wordsworth poem 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was inspired when, walking along Ullswatter, he rounded a corner and was confronted by thousands of daffodils swaying in the breeze. I had a similar experience when, walking along the Derwent water, I rounded a corner and was confronted by hundreds of ducks, also swaying in the breeze*. Both William and myself, separated by miles and centuries, but linked by a shared moment of pantheistic awe, stopped short, muttered to ourselves 'man, that sure is a lot of daffodils/ducks,' and, filled with a white hot burst of creativity, grabbed our notebooks and bled poetry onto the page. My effort is below.

Puddleduck

I wish I were a little duck

I'd float around - it wouldn't suck

I wouldn't miss those things I'd lack,

'Cause I could swim and fly and quack

I would dine on bread and fishes

Dine on me? I'd be delicious! 

I'm sure you'll agree, it is a masterpiece. You can probably google Wordsworth's effort. Whatevs. I've always been more of a Coleridge man.  Oh, and here's another illustration thingummy from Stitchskin, shorn of any context that might provide it with meaning.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Do ducks sway? yes. They do. Shut the duck up.

The Trouble With Arsenal is That They Always Try to Just walk It In

I'd say that Chris O'Dowd* is my spirit animal, but I'm A) probably too old to get away with saying things like that and B) fairly certain that's the plot of Moone Boy

Some of the more culturally astute of you will have noticed that the World Cup's on. For those of you not in the know, this is a associated football competition contested by various nationalities including, but by no means limited to, the French. The last team standing at the end of the tournament is presented a golden ice cream truck by Dame Helen Mirren and given a lovely sloppy kiss and a high five. All the other teams have to call the winners 'Sir' and make them sandwiches for a year, at which point we go through the whole shebang again. This year the tournament's being held in Brazil who are celebrating the universal appeal and uniting power of the game by flattening poor communities and shooting protesters in the face.

Despite what the above inanity may suggest, I am actually quite fond of the World Cup. I like the spectacle, the sense of occasion and the little men running around and kicking balls. I even like the fact that something about Phil Neville's commentary on the BBC puts me in mind of a robot struggling to process the concept of love. You could argue that the Premier League provides the same sort of thing, but closer to home. But there are those of us out there who support solid, but not particularly glamorous teams like Middlesbrough who aren't in the premiership and so it's nice to have an international tournament every couple of years, even if it's awarded by a governing body as irredeemably corrupt as FIFA. 

What I've never been particularly boshed with is the whole three lions shite that often rears its head around this time. Don't get me wrong, I like England. I keep most my stuff there, the weather's unlikely to kill you and bacon sandwiches are plentiful and easy to come by. But nothing can persuade me to view twenty two men kicking a ball around as anything more than an entertaining distraction, as opposed to a re-staging of the battle of Agincourt, our hopes, dreams and aspirations hanging on the result. There's nowt wrong with a bit of enthusiasm, of course, but we seem to expect what is, at the end of the day, a game to somehow embody the nation, which ends up being just a teensy bit reductive as you've effectively condensed an entire national history to what the lizard brain of a terminally drunk football fan can still remember around around the eight pint mark. You can see why the Scots get arsey.  

Thankfully, mainly due to the national team being a bit on the green side this time round, expectations are much lower than normal this year and the resulting coverage has bordered on the sane. The Sun newspaper has made a token effort though, sending out a free advertisement newspaper, headlined 'This Is Our England' with a Sgt Peppers type collage of what it presumably believes are pre-eminent examples of English greatness. This is the kind of thing the paper always does, taking broadly popular cultural reference points and appropriating them, as if it itself was in some way responsible for Only Fools and Horses and The Beatles. Depressingly noteworthy was the sheer ball shrivelling banality of most of the choices. There are, let me be clear, many reasons I love England and am grateful that I was born here. James Corden and Simon Cowell are not amongst them. 

I was also interested to read about the brief shitstorm that hit Ed Miliband when the daft tit agreed to pose for a deeply unflattering photo holding the aforementioned shite rag, thereby offending the entirety of Merseyside (incidentally, when did we become okay with our senior politicians shilling for private companies in order to help them shift product?).  It generally seems to be accepted that the Labour leader's dropped a bit of a bollock over the issue, which I tend to agree with, but surely he's not the one who's come out looking the worst out of all this, given that it's prompted discussion of why this was considered such a faux pas in the first place. It's reminded people that The Sun, a paper that presumes to speak for the English working class, saw fit to slander Liverpool fans (the majority of whom are, erm, English and working class) in the most vicious manner possible  in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, only offering an almost apology decades later. Amazingly, following Miliband's apology, this morning's editorial (The link leads to another blog discussing the issue. The paper itself exists behind a pay wall) managed over a 100 words of self righteous outrage without once even hinting at why so many in one of Britain's most important cities wont even wipe their arse with the paper, instead framing the controversy as the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition suffering some sort of patriotism cringe. 

So remember: overly enthusiastic, ever so slightly forced love of football is good and natural and proper. Actually giving a shit about the lives of football fans and their families is very, very bad and evidence you hate this country and should probably fuck off to Russia. 

Sod it, I'm off to watch the second half of France v Honduras and have a pie. Here's another character sketch from that thing what I writes.

This one has a moustache.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Yes, that's meant to be Chris O'Dowd on the left. Shut up.

Darling Buds of May

Spring has finally sprung here in sunny, sunny Sunderland. Windows have been thrown and coats have been cast off. The  air is filled with music and the sea has transformed from its usual sludgy grey colour to an inviting, sparkly blue. Pigeon chested young boys and wrinkly old men alike have stripped to the waist and are parading round the town in a manner that is making the rest of us feel slightly queasy. And once again my head is spinning as I grapple with the realisation that if I want to sit in the park, read and eat ice cream then I bloody well can, because I'm a goddamn adult and can eat as much goddamn ice cream as I feel like, so shut up. Happily for me the good weather has coincided with a weeks leave from work, meaning I find myself in the happy situation of having nothing to do and a whole lot of time in which to do it. I have no responsibilities beyond vague ambition to put my flat in some semblance of order and a not particularly anticipated visit to the doctors in the next few days (It transpires I require a handsomectomy as, apparently, I have been handsoming for far too long and far too hard*). 

There's also the Euro elections later in the week. Normally my interest in these would hover just above the nil mark, if for no other reason than round these parts you could pin a red rosette to a three legged dog and it'd win. This year however there is the rise of UKIP to contend with, a party that feel the need to tell people, unprompted, they are non racist and then proceed to run an election campaign based on foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs and about how discomforting it is when swarthy gentlemen move in next door to you. Depressingly, despite coming on like the political wing of the Daily Mail, it looks like they might actually win the thing, which, given they have no sitting MP's and were unheard of ten years ago is admittedly impressive, but ultimately depressing, like knocking yourself out with the smell of your own farts. Most people seem to be putting it down to a stick-it-to-the-man/a-plague-on-both-your-houses sentiment amongst the electorate (that, perhaps ironically, appears to be Europe wide), because nothing says anti-establishment like a party led by the white, middle aged, privately educated son of a stock broker. Frustratingly attempts to engage, reason and debate have been few and far between, with too many attempts to counter the party boiling down to drawing attention the fact that UKIP has a lot of reactionary nutters in its ranks, which is as much news as Noah building an ark, and is too easily dismissed as smears by the 'LibLab Con' (a phrase so steeped in fuckwittery that I actually got slightly angry typing it). It was therefore somewhat gratifying to listen to a rather prickly interview that Nigel Farage did with LBC where he was subjected  to the sort of aggressive grilling that, rightly or wrongly, we should expect to be given to any party leader. More of this, please. But next time try to bring in the utter bollocks that is their economic policy.

The above doodle is for a story I've been working on, provisionally titled Stitchskin. I write "working on" as if there is any other state my various projects ever exist in. My own, ever evolving, standards coupled with the fact that I write at the same speed that old folk make love means that I've been on with it for fucking ever, a Sisyphusean task that'd be utterly dispiriting if I didn't take joy from the act of creation. Common sense tells me to put the whole thing aside and maybe try my hand at something else, like, perhaps, joinery. However, like a loose flap of skin on the roof of my mouth, I find myself unable to forget it or leave it alone. Maybe some day it'll get it'll reach a state of demi-semi completeness and I'll be able to get it out there. Until that time it's a good source of inspiration as any when I'm looking for something to draw. Below is another picture of the protagonist (Meg Thomas. In case you care. I suspect you don't) done way back when. Because why not?

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Warning: possibly bullshit