Bye George

After a week of blood and tears I've finally started to make some progress with the  website, It's still very much a work in progress, but at least the damn thing now loads, which is something. As before you can have a wee gander at www.talesoftheboxingnun.com. The ten thousandth unique visitor wins a potato that looks like Gary Oldman.  I would have like to have created something special for it, but instead I farted out the below. It's a rejigged version of a strip I drew many, many years ago called Myxamotosis (so named because random non sequiturs are the same thing as wit, right? Right?!). It was - and I hope I don't sound too conceited here - deeply, deeply shit, but out of the fifty or so strips I managed to create before friends and well wishers intervened there's perhaps two or three that I'm fond of - or, at least, don't find offensively bad.

As all true Ingerlish patriots know it was St George's day Thursday gone. It something of a meme that this our national day is something that we, as a nation, are actively discouraged from celebrating. As with the similar urban myth about how Christmas has totally been renamed winterval so as not to offend the Zoroastrians, this can be readily disproved by the highly scientific method of wandering around any medium to large English settlement with your eyes open and noting the surfeit of red and white flags outside and on top of  every pub, church and government building.

What is true, or at least truer, is the general lack of enthusiasm expressed by the general populace to for a possibly fictional Lebanese guy who never came here and probably never even fought a dragon. But apathy is not the same thing as censorship and, really, what could be more English than a half hearted shrug and mumbling "s'alrite, I guess,' when asked to comment on our national heritage. We all carry our own version of England around with us; some of us carry it in the chambers and vestibules of our heart, some of us in a metaphorical Tesco's carrier bag, pulled from a pile of of other metaphorical carrier bags that we keep stuffed under the sink (also metaphorical). For John Major -via George Orwell - England is long shadows on cricket grounds and old maids cycling to communion through morning mist, for me it's more ill advised daytime drinking, going to Greggs the bakers when you can't be arsed to cook and using utterly unsexy words like 'knockers' and 'bonking' to describe otherwise sexy things. The point being that it is private and peculiar  to each English man and woman, which to my mind is far preferable  to waving plastic flags and getting wobbly lipped over Elgar (private and peculiar is also as good a summation of the national character as I can be bothered to come up with at the present time).

Far better, if we must celebrate something around this time of year, to make a song and a dance about it being Shakespeare's birthday; he invented, like, a million words, bequeathed his wife his second best bed and may have really been two tiny Catholics dressed as a single big Protestant in a trench-coat. Also Language can be a more positive force than nationalism, and when it comes to language the English are the best word guy people around. Way better than the French.

In other news I'll be running in the Sunderland City 10k next week, because I am good like that. Look out for me, I'll be the purple faced one with the tears rolling softly down his face As is the custom with these things you can sponsor me, with a donations going to Shelter.


Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Public Service Announcement

Apologies about the lack of an update. I'm currently on trying to set up a proper, grown up website for the various bits and bobs of creative detritus that I've uploaded here as, if I'm honest, Blogger is not a particularly good platform for displaying images. Unfortunately, as the north east of England's techno-weenie in chief this is taking rather longer than I anticipated, by which I mean I've spent the last two hours trying and failing to get an image to display on an otherwise empty screen. Friends and well-wishers assure me that technology has now progressed to a point where tasks such as setting up a website are basically idiot proof. This leads me to the somewhat discomfitting conclusion that I exist on a level somewhere below idiot and should not be let out of the house without adult supervision.

Intellectually I know that throwing my computer out of the window and sobbing like a child will do nothing to further my goals, but on a gut level this feels very right. I shall keep you updated whether head or heart wins; in the case of the former by means of this blog, if the latter, by means of shouting git loud off somewhere high.

As and when I get the fucker working you can get your peruse on at www.talesoftheboxingnun.com (link not currently working because of course it fucking doesn't you worthless piece of shit I swear if you were a man I would straight up kick you in the bastard throat scrattumfrattum......). In the interim here's a picture of a boxing nun, because that is the thing what the thing is named after

Pictured above: Art

In other news, the precious moments I've been away from my computer screen have been spent wheezing my way around the Tyne and Wear metropolitan area as I'm currently in training for the Sunderland City 10K. As is customary with these things you can sponsor me by clicking the following link, all donations will be going towards the UK charity Shelter

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Electioneering

The bi-decennial festival of equivocation, obfuscation and all round bullshit that is the British election is upon us, heralded this year by a series of television debates. The first was between the Prime Ministers and the leader of the opposition. Except it wasn't, as the PM outright refused to partake in anything resembling a one on one debate and what we got instead was two back to back interviews with Jeremy Paxman, a walking advert for the dangers of believing your own hype, and an audience Q and A featuring such hard hitting questions as "Who is your favourite Power Ranger, and you can't say the green one,' and  'Potatoes: roasted or mashed. Discuss.' The whole thing, therefore, could be written off as a colossal waste of time if it wasn't for the incumbent government's frankly bizarre strategy of depicting their opponent as a man so incapable he couldn't relieve himself in the wilderness without pissing on an electric fence. While the meme of Mr Miliband as an awkward dork didn't exactly spring from nowhere - please see literally any interview the guy's ever done -  the Ed as Mr Bean line of attack has been so overplayed that we've now reached a point where 'man answers question reasonably coherently' suddenly becomes a political turnaround on par with Marc Anthony's 'honourable man' speech in Julius Caesar.

Then, of course, we had the multi party debates or - as they were somewhat inevitably referred to - the massed debates, featuring every political leader in the land who A) have  MP's sitting in the House of Commons and B) aren't Northern Irish, because fuck those guys (apparently). 

For those who are A) unfamiliar with British political party leaders B) don't care C) are unable to recognise them from my shitty drawings - l-r we have David Cameron (Conservative), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nichola Sturgeon (Scottish Nationalist), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Natalie Bennett (The Green Party)

Two observations about the gratuitous mass debating have already been discussed by far cleverer people than me at great length: that 1) when the full range of mainstream political opinion is given a platform it quickly becomes apparent that the UK is a lot more left wing than a perusal of The Sun would have you believe, and that 2) it's generally nice to see more XX chromosomes on the podium. For me though, the takeaway is - again -  how significantly our expectations have been lowered with regards to public discourse in this country. That UKIP's Mr Farage, a man who couldn't be more of a spiv if he grew a pencil moustache and began operating a coconut shy, and the physical embodiment of the sort of received wisdom that ascertains that Jews can hear gold and that Asian ladies have sideways fannies - is welcomed by the media as some sort of rebel voice, while Nichola Sturgeon, the leader of a reasonably progressive party with a solid record of competent governance, is regarded as a dangerous unknown quantity, depresses me more than I can articulate at present.

The other point I would make is that British politics has become so fractured that the first past the post system we currently implement is fundamentally broken. But that is rant for another time.

With regards to the above scribblings, I feel I should apologise to any supporters of Ms Bennett, who generally speaking, I have some time for. At the risk of explaining the joke, her line is a reference to a recent car crash interview in which she lapsed into an embarrassed silence when asked to cost some of her policies and later blamed this on a case of the sniffles.  

I also apologise for the reduction of complex political positions to infantile soundbites (although what's good for the goose...). I am to political satire what farting in the bath is to perfumery

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Word to Your Mother

Just a quick image dump this week. I shouldn't be pleased with myself for managing to produce a page two consecutive weeks in a row, but I am. Don't judge me. You don't know my life.

I did have an accompanying rant about how I'm 86% confident I could take Jeremy Clarkson in a fight. Unfortunately I only got as far as drafting it out in the purple lined notebook with the happy elephant on the cover that exists exclusively in my head before I was kidnapped by a gang of desperate characters and forced to participate in a dangerous mission of international importance, by which I mean I went out for a Nandos with the family. I will bore you with my very important views on trivial matters next time,

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton.

Sunshine on Leith

Was away last week on romance related duties, hence the lack of an update. It was me and the missus's two year anniversary so she took the high road and I took the low road and we were both in Scotland before ye. We didn't get to the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, but we did make it to Edinburgh, which is - as I'm sure you're aware - plenty bonnie itself.  I've been to Auld Reekie before, but more in a go there, get shit done, leave again capacity so it was nice to see the place in a more leisurely context. If you've never been, go there now, it's beautiful. Also hilly, but that's not really relevant. Thanks to the wonders of deal-of-the day-voucher websites we stayed in what was quite easily the swankiest hotel I've ever been in. The restaurant served food on unconventionally shaped plates, so you knew it was legit posh.

We also went to the zoo, because nothing lets a girl know that you love her and cherish the years you've shared together better than taking her look at some incarcerated animals. We saw pandas and penguins and bears (oh my) and I have now decided that squirrel monkeys are the best monkeys. A good time was had by all, save perhaps one melancholy chimp whose mate nicked one of his carrots. I would recommend it to anybody reading this and thinking of going, although would advise you to allow for more time than the few hours we set aside as it's deceptively large and, as with everything else in Edinburgh, hilly.

Closer to home the above image is a bit of a homage to Get Carter. I've recently finished Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home, the source novel for the film, which in turn inspired me to watch Michael Caine's Geordie western, which in turn inspired the above doodlage. While I've written previously that Billy Wilder's The Appartment is my number one film of all time, Get Carter has a quite comfortable berth in my personal top ten, mainly because it is one of the most insanely quotable films of all time, think Philip Marlowe by way of Mike Leigh. The film is also notable/notorious for being the number one factor in prolonging the life of Gateshead's Trinity Car Park one of the locations in the film and a building notable for being a) completely and utterly fuck ugly, and b) a car park which, thanks to the somewhat acute angle of its entrance ramp, was inaccessible to cars. There's a Tesco's there now, which is also fuck ugly, but at least you can actually access it to buy some dairylea and toilet duck.

Also, to make amends for the lack of words, there's another page of Rag and Bone below, inform the people.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Mackem Beasts and Where to Find Them

I finished the latest page of Rag and Bone,  because I said I would and I'm good like that. As I was congratulating myself on a job well done (or probably more accurately a job that's... well... done) and prepared to settle in for the night with a lovely hot cup of Worcester sauce it suddenly popped up in my news feed that Hyde and Beast were doing a free gig at Pop Recs round the corner from me. Despite already having changed into my lazy pants I made an executive decision to go check it out, because, dammit, if I don't go to these things, who will?

Actually it turns out that lots of people will as the place was packed with the great and the good of Wearside. As is traditional at these sort of things the very tallest present had arranged themselves into a blockade directly in front of me, compounding the fact that the lead singer of the group is a rather diminutive,beardy chap who may or may not have taken part in the quest to reclaim Erebor.

I didn't really know much about Hyde and Beast going in beyond there's two guys, one who's called Mr Hyde and another who, disappointingly, is not called Mr Beast. It transpires that they play jaunty McCartneyesque pop/rock that I wouldn't really have imagined coming from former members of The Futureheads and The Golden Virgins. While a record shop's not really an optimal setting to see any band, the band came across as tight, likeable, with plenty of tunage in their arsenal, certainly on a par or better than a lot of the guitar based acts out there.

Of course, the fact that it was free was a definite plus. Again, full props should be given to the various Heartstrings that run the Pops Recs record shop for providing a space for shit like this to take place.  Earlier this week Sunderland announced it'd be bidding to be the UK capital culture 2021. While the initial reaction from myself and others was the raised eyebrows and suppressed snorts of the terminally cynical if there were a few more places like that around town it wouldn't seem quite so daft.

Below's the video for a single from last year's Keep Moving album, which I thought had a nice Crosby, Stills and Nash 'Our House' vibe

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Auf Weidershen, Pets

I've spent most of this weekend working on a daft distance learning thing. It's basically an employers market at the moment and as such most companies feel little compulsion to train or develop staff. I therefore figured it'd be a positive step to take the initiative and do a few things that I could add to my CV. Unfortunately, as the whole thing was done in a sort of 'tomorrow is too late' spirit I ended up signing on for the first course I came across, which was a course in Equality and Diversity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm generally all for equality, diversity, tolerance and rainbows, but when 90% of your course material can be summarised as 'don't be a bigoted dick-meister', then you'll forgive me if after a while I began to find the whole thing a bit tedious.  

One lot of people who would probably agree that the whole thing was a waste of time - although probably for very different reasons - would be PEGIDA (Which stands for Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Duh.), who were just up the road in Newcastle the other day. If, like me, you are baffled as to why a German right wing nationalist movement were demonstrating in the north of England it seems that the group operates a sort of franchise system within different countries (a structure it shares, perhaps ironically, with Al Qaeda), so it was basically the English Defence League/Britain First/The National Front waving different flags and trying to piggyback on the success of a more successful group of toss merchants. Even so Newcastle seemed a rather arbitrary choice of venue. I spent several years years living on Tyneside and it never really came across as a powder keg of racial tension. A cynic might posit that it was selected as the North East has quite high levels of social deprivation and historically such places tend to be fertile breeding ground for the angry slap heads.

The organisers predicted that there'd be thousands demonstrating and, in all fairness, they were correct, with attendance around 2,000. However it should be noted that those thousands were on the other side of the police barricade, at the counter demonstration organised under the banner Newcastle Unites. PEGIDA meanwhile managed less than a fifth of that, and most of those seemed to be coming from outside the region. For the most part though, it seems the Geordies simply couldn't be arsed.  The inorganic, bussed in nature of the whole thing was probably best illustrated by the fact that the organisers had utterly failed to take into account that Newcastle United were playing at home. Given a choice between standing in the freezing cold, shouting into the drizzle about things you hate or doing something halfway enjoyable with their Saturday most people seemed to have plumped for the latter. In a nice little demonstration of the occasional synchronicity of the universe, the Geordies won their match with a goal by Pappis Cisse, a practicing Muslim. Back in the Bigg Market meanwhile, a lot of council taxpayer's time and resources was spent humouring the clash of civilisation fantasies of a handful of professional miserabilists. So that's something.

Most of the way through a page for Rag and Bone, added a work in progress below. should have it finished by next week. Huzzah