But down below,
Something was seeping,
Turtle’s head was peeping,
I did need a poo!

I wore my troose,
Without a lining.
Can you believe the timing?
They were brand new.

And in the South,
The wind was breaking
Round my hole was caking
And I need a poo.

A crash of drums,
a flash of light!
My brand new pants,
Were full of shite.

My bowels faded into slackness,
I had done a poo

Anyway, this is how I came to stumble upon Isaiah 60:16.

The verse contains a perfectly respectable prophetic image in its original context, but after reading it I immediately realised it would have made an absolutely disastrous substitute for Jules Winnfield’s famous Bible speech in Pulp Fiction.

Of course, Jules’s “Ezekiel 25:17” isn’t really Ezekiel 25:17 at all. The real biblical verse is much shorter. The speech about “the righteous man”, “the tyranny of evil men” and the “shepherding of the weak” was invented for the film. Tarantino just borrowed the reference and built something a lot more cinematic around it.

And thank goodness he did, and that he did it so well, because after reading Isaiah 60:16 I couldn’t stop myself from imagining an alternative version of that apartment scene, had he chosen a different but similar verse.

Jules takes a bite of Brett’s burger.

JULES
Mmm. That’s a tasty burger.

Jules chews for a moment, appreciating the flavour.

JULES
What country you from?

BRETT
What?

JULES
”What” ain’t no country I ever heard of! They speak English in “What”?

BRETT
What?

JULES
ENGLISH, MOTHERF***ER! DO YOU SPEAK IT?!

BRETT
Yes!

JULES
Then you understand what I’m saying?

BRETT
Yes.

JULES
Now describe what Marcellus Wallace look like!

Brett whimpers. Jules sighs and shakes his head slowly whilst taking out a .45 and trying its weight in his hand

JULES
Brett, have you ever read the Bible?

BRETT
Y-yes.

JULES
There’s a passage I got memorised. Pretty appropriate for this situation.

He strolls slowly across the room.

JULES
Isaiah.

Pause.

JULES
Chapter sixty.

Pause.

JULES
Verse sixteen.

Long silence.

JULES
“Thou shalt suck the milk of the Gentiles...”

Brett blinks.

JULES
“And thou shalt suckle the breast of Kings...”

BRETT
What?

JULES (shouting and pressing the barrel of the .45 hard into Brett’s cheek)
Say “What” again!
C’mon, say “What” again!
I dare ya!
I double dare ya, motherfucker!
Say “What” one more goddam time!

BRETT
No. I won’t.
I’m sorry. I really won’t.
Please… don’t… Oh God!

Jules steps back and continues.

JULES
Gooood.
Now, as I was saying,
“And thou shalt know...”

JULES (Raising his pistol).
“That I am thy saviour!”

Beat.

JULES
“Thy redeemer!”

Beat.

JULES
“THAT I AM THY LORD!”

Beat.

JULES (reaching into his shirt pocket for a handkerchief to wipe grease from the burger off his fingers)
“The Mighty One of Jacob.”

Long silence.

JULES (still fumbling with his shirt under his jacket, distracted now)
“If you have brass I will bring gold,”

BRETT (confused by the lack of being shot to death, opens one eye to look at Jules quizzically and sees him fumbling with his shirt)
Wait...are you asking me to suck your nipple?

VINCENT
Why has everybody always gotta make things sexual?

BRETT
Because he literally just told me to “suck the breast of kings” and now he’s fiddling with his shirt like he’s about to whip a tittie out.
(shrugging)
I mean, is that speech, like, you know, his way of asking someone to suck his nipple?

VINCENT
Mentioning breasts does not make it sexual. It could be figurative.

BRETT
How is that not sexual?

VINCENT
Look… let me explain this to you.
Some things just are not sexual.

BRETT
Example?

VINCENT
A foot rub ain’t sexual.

BRETT
But this isn’t a foot rub.

VINCENT
You’re missin’ the point.

BRETT
No, you’re missin’ the point.

VINCENT
Look. There’s suckin’ a nipple, and then there’s suckin’ a nipple.

BRETT
That’s the same thing twice.

VINCENT
No it ain’t.

BRETT
It absolutely is.

VINCENT
Context, y’know?

BRETT
What context?

VINCENT
Biblical context.

BRETT
He’s pointing a gun at me!

JULES
Gentlemen?

They turn to look at him in silence.

JULES
Do you mind?
The Lord is tryin’ to redeem some motherfucker here.

Vincent looks back at Brett and empties a full clip into him.

VINCENT (returning Jules’s accusatory look)
What? Boring conversation anyway.

TL;DR version:
“One day this show will just be the Doctor, six former companions, a reality-destroying cosmic threat, a miracle resolution, two or more Doctors and lots of shouting.”

Well? Is I the correck?

Doctor Who (spoliers) - SUNDAY, JULY 06, 2008 - The day after Journey’s End aired in the UK.

So, Russell T Davis has finally run out of ideas. Although some would argue he ran out of ideas round-abouts 2/3 of the way through “Queer as Folk”.

I would say look away now if you haven’t seen it, but, to be honest, you probably HAVE already seen it. It all seems very familiar.


Doctor: “Bad Wolf! Zoinks. My trousers are about to split because Rose is coming back. Hubba hubba.”
Donna: “Am I bovvered? Eek! Onoz! Someone has nicked my planet. I’m sure it was there a moment ago.”
Doctor: “Hmmm... It is those Daleks again. I know coz I am the clever.”

Tardis: “Ring ring, ring ring.”
Doctor: “Hello… that is the phone. It is Captain Jack from Touch-wood. Would. Hello Jack, we need to borrow a cup of story lines.”
Donna: “Hubba hubba.”
Doctor: “Hang on, there is more peoples there... Sarah!”
Sarah: “Martha!”
Martha: “Jack!”
Jack: “Donna!”
Donna: “Doctor!”
Sarah: “Martha!”
Martha: “Jack!”
Jack: “Donna!”
Doctor: “Brad! Janet! Rocky!”

Jack: “You can be in my story-line any day, Dr. Whoar! Let’s go watch a box-set of ‘Queer as Folk’ whilst I warm up the baby oil. Have, BTW.”
Doctor: “Sod you Jack, there’s Rose! Now for some front-bottom action.”
Donna: “Oi! What about my Lady Garden?”
Dalek: “ZAP! I haz shot you at last, Doctor. LOL. Daleks 1, Doctor nil.”
Jack: “Get a load of my ENORMOUS weapons.”
Dalek: “Onoz! I have been shot to death by a big gun!”
Doctor: “Help. I am regenerating. Oh, no I’m not. I have used the power contained in the media frenzy surrounding my regeneration to repair the damage and has done a quick hand job to boot. LOL. Right, now who’s the bad guy whose arse I am going to spank?”

Davros: “We meet again, Doctor. Let me demonstrate my wonderful Death Star.”
Doctor: “Onoz! Darth Davros! This will not be as easy as I thought because your arse is actually a Dalek’s bottom and is made of metal. And you have captured my companions and imprisoned them, like usual. Not only that, but you appear to have destroyed my Tardis. Bugger, now I shall lose my no claims bonus, oh yes.”

Donna: “Screamy screamy screamy, SMASH! Ooops. WTF? Phwoar! It is another Doctor.”
Doctor2: “Oooh errr. I appear to be naked and on national television.”
Donna: “Hubba hubba. Let’s get back to the others for a foursome.”
Doctor2: “I will need a hand to fly the Tardis back. Pump this rod vigourously as I am not the real doctor and have no morals.”

TARDIS: “Groany, groany, wheezy, groan. Thump.”

Davros: “Onoz! A Tardis, and another doctor. I did not expect this! That c**t Tennant will no doubt get a double fee for this! But no matter, for I am really the Emperor from Star Wars and I have electric fingers! Take that!”
Donna: “Ow! Hang on... I is the clever now! And I have become merged with time-thingy, just like that blonde bimbo, only better ‘cos I am from Norf of the river! And with added shout. Take that, Dalek scum! LOL.”
Dalek: “Extermi... erk. Deaded.”
Another Dalek: “Also extermi... erk. I is dead, too.”
Dalek supreme: “Extermi.... erk! I is also dead.”

Doctors 1&2: “W00T! We has killed all the Daleks to death. Again. At least until next year. And the Death Star is crumbling to dust around us. Quick, into the Tardis.”
Doctor 1: “Onoz! My worst enemy is about to be fried to death, I must save the genocidal mentalist. Here, Davros; pull my finger!”
Davros: “I’m not falling for your Time Lord tricks. Now FO and take your shouty, ginger t**t of a wife away with you!”
Doctor 1: “But we’re not... oh, FFS. Die then, git.”

Doctor 2: “Now we shall all touch each others bottoms while we take the Earth back home. I have some cheesy music to put on the Tardis’s 8-track whilst we do so.”
K9: “Affirmative master, and the fee for my appearance will keep Russell T Davis in Jammy Dodgers and Shirley Bassey CDs for life!”

Doctor: “Good-bye Mickey, good-bye Jack, Jackie, Martha, Sarah, oh sod this. Just bugger off out of my Tardis, the lot of you. You can take the Tube home.”
Donna: “Ow! My head hurts. I is not feeling too clever.”
Rose: “Am I bovvered? How about a three-some, gorgeous.”
Doctor 2: “I am ALIVE! And now I will sex you into a parallel dimension, Rose, because this is no longer a kids show and I have not had more than a peck on the cheek for 40 years, so I am hornier than a Daemon on Viagra!”
Donna: “Whiny whiny whine, head hurts.”
Doctor 1: “Forget all about me. I is now alone. *sniff* Again.”

The End

Format (c) ScaryDuck Pubshitling, 2006

But here’s the TRUTH.

Ring-a-ring-a-roses? A lesson in how to be a PLAGUE VICTIM, with rose-coloured circular rashes, sneezing and scented herb-bags to hide the smell.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary? Quite a sadistic and staunch Catholic Mary Tudor who used thumbscrews known as “Silver Bells” and had a garden of martyred Protestants.

Oranges and Lemons? Every good Christian should be able to recite the names of all the churches and parishes of London. And what about the end where the chopper chops off your head, like at the infamous Tyburn Tree execution post? The Old Bailey, maybe?

Jack and Jill? Surely completely made up? Well, Jack was King Louis XVI who was beheaded (broke his crown) as was Jill aka Marie Antoinette.

Pop Goes The Weasel? Cockney rhyming slang commentary on social deprivation. (Pop = pawn and Weasel and Stoat = coat.) The Eagle was a well known pub on the City Road.

Wind the Bobbin up? Well, that was taught to children in the workhouses so that they would know the timing of the huge shuttle looms so they could scoot underneath them to fix problems with the threads without getting mangled by the machinery.

So, continuing the theme, how about we teach our kids some games that will help them in later life. How about:

Musical Chairs? When the sound stops, you have to fight everyone else for a seat on the board. Pointy elbow use encouraged.

Sardines? Useful for the City commuter.

Hide and Seek? When the bailiffs call.

Simon Says? Compliance training for beginners.

Happy childhood, everyone.

I've lost my sense of gravity;

The clock struck one, I drifted free,

And scared a pigeon in Dundee.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I've run out of electricity;

The clock struck two, the lights went dark,

And then the cat began to bark.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

A goat consumed my battery;

At three he made great beeping tones,

And started charging mobile phones.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I've mislaid my identity;

At four I cried, "I'm Briony Crump,

Formerly Colonel Waffle-Pump!"

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

The budgie's stolen all my tea;

At five he opened up a shop

Behind the church and tramway stop.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I've run short of humanity;

By six I'd searched both woods and lake,

Found only thruppence and an Eccles cake.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I've lost my cup of sanity;

At seven a hedgehog came to tea

And left me lacking clarity.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

My aunty swallowed a dictionary;

At eight she sneezed out A through G,

Then Hippopotamus and Jamboree.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

There's a hole in my locality;

At nine I found, to my dismay,

The village had quietly slipped away.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I've broken my felicity;

At ten it tumbled down the stair,

And scattered rainbows everywhere.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

I cannot find my "is", you see;

At eleven my "was" sat in the shed,

Discussing grammar with Uncle Fred.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

Time has taken leave of me;

At twelve the clock struck January,

Tuesday week, and Tennessee.

Alas, I cry with alacrity,

What excellent calamity!

Though woes bloom thick in every bower,

They come precisely, on the hour.

"No", I tell him, "it's a power surge, I saw the lights go."

He says, "A bus has blown up at Tavistock Square."

That's near where I used to work, and I think, "But there's no big transformers or generators for the Tube around that area. What's going on?"

I browse onto BBC news and see that there's disruption in London. I'm still holding onto the belief it's a terrible power surge that's blown some equipment.

10:15 - I hang up on the wife, telling her I'll call her later when I've more idea of what's going on.

For the rest of the day I watch BBC's live news feed on my computer. It's horrible. I'm getting emails from all over asking if I'm OK. I phone my mother and I get a call from my father on the mobile. The phone rings every 20 minutes, and I'm phoning home every hour. If someone wants anything fixed today, they'll have to wait. I don't think they are going to, though. Most of the people here are leaving early.

16:30 - I decide it's time to try to get home. The mainline trains have started running again, so I go down to London Bridge Pier to get a Westbound ferry to Festival Pier. A paddle steamer pulls up and says it's going to Waterloo. I think "that'll do" not realising Waterloo is another name for Festival pier.

The paddle steamer is packed - I’m standing by the railings that guard the area where the counterweights for the fake chimney stacks swing so the boat can pass under the low bridges. Some people are drinking and chilling like it’s a river party. Glasses chinking, pink bubbles sloshing around. It is hot. Drink and deep water have never seemed like a good idea to me.

From the pier I walk up through London; Northumberland Avenue, Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road.

Shops all have notices up saying "Closed." There are thousands of people walking and cycling everywhere. There are hardly any motor vehicles on the road except peculiar black cars with blue lights hidden in their grills that go racing by every few minutes.

There are police everywhere; I've never seen so many. It’s like that bit from Terminator Two - “all of them, I think”.

I decide to call up my friends at UCL. They haven't replied to my emails and the area is cordoned off by the police. I get through on the mobile, but to my friend's wife. She's heard from my friend. He's trying to get back home. As I pass the Jeremy Bentham pub, it looks crowded. I'm tempted to go for a drink; I'm thirsty, London is dusty, but I need to get home to the family.

17:58 - I arrive at the National Rail station and board a train.There is hardly anyone else on board.
18:44 - I arrive at my stop to be met by my wife and my son. She's nearly in tears. I don't understand why because I've been on the phone to her on and off most of the day. She’s over-emotional and half-stoned to take away the panic.
18:55 - We arrive back at home. My daughter's made a cup of tea for me (it had too much milk in it but I drank it anyway) and I turn on the news. We all sit and watch TV until bed time.

Sleep doesn’t come for me until dawn.

I am not laughing.

What strikes me is the gradual transition from inconvenience to catastrophe:

• Disrupted commute.

• Significant infrastructure failure.

• Rumours.

• News. Confirmation. Police statements. COBRA. PM making speeches.

• Realisation. People are dead. A LOT of people. People like me.

Terrorism again. Not like the last time. Not like the IRA. I’ve walked past their bombs before. I’ve been closer to their kind of death. But they gave warnings. They targeted banks and infrastructure, and political targets not everyday people. They wanted disruption not death.

I am not laughing.

Past church and farm, through rural idyll unchanged since kings and wizards. Through city grey, through forest green.

Onward on — the horse, the dawn — they race, come weather fair or foul.

Metropolis to metropolis, no pause for sleepy hamlets. Laughing still at narrow boats too slow, too slow; the barges yawn and murmur, no fuss.

“Journey is as journey does,” they rumble. “That stitch in time that just saved nine is for mine a lifetime whole”. So drawls those slow, ancient ribbons of water, stone and wood.

And ever onward, aye, ever on.

Past smoking stacks long lost of breath and iron spires that prick the paling sky;
 where soot like sable snow once fell 
‘pon the collars of the hurried and the poor.

Past streets of cobble, sett and tar; turnpike yields to piston, wheel to will of fire and steam,
 yet still the noble creature strains, a creature born to field and plough now pressed and wrought by pace and progress.

No rest, no gentle loiter in hedgerow’s shade — 
time, that stern conductor, calls them ever forward.


And though the road remembers ages softer,
of pilgrim’s hymn and staggered step, there is now so little borne save industry’s great load

On, on they press. Through clamour, clod, and cinder — the horse, the dawn, a world outpaced,
 yet haunted still, by all it has replaced.

Set back from road and restless age,
old farms crouch in patient stone and timber,
their weathered beams bowed and cockeyed
memory set by many and heavier years.

The manor houses linger still, austere and ivy-clad, shuttered eyes half-closed to time’s advance; the echoes of a gentler tyranny. Of suppers lit by oil or candle. Of whispered names long spent.

At crossroads stand the public house, warm with age, low beams steeped in ale and bawdy tale, where laughter, thick as smoke and smoke itself outlives those from whence escaped.

And close beside the leaning yew, the graveyards keep their watch. Uneven stones, epitaphs grown soft with rain and years, a quiet, somber record kept the grave arithmetic of life: the brief, the burdened, and the long-forgot.

Here lies the world that measured not in haste but counted time by season, in harvests gathered, in frosts endured, in Sundays spent In prayer and hymn. A world whose hours were held by courts of sun and moon — marked by bell and bird and dew, not wheel and whip and due.

Yet onward — aye, still onward — must the iron horses push, and these, left standing, sigh at the passing: no bitterness but with resigned melancholy and the solemn grace of things that knew their time and, knowing, let it go.

And thus the pattern widens, as thread is laid on thread a tapestry not wrought by plan
but wove the same by a myriad hands, great and small and wan.

Driver, merchant, ostler, clerk. The unseen multitudes whose measured toil bound road to rail, and field to forge, and horse to barge.

So is this modern fabric made and kept:
of hoof and wheel, of hand and will, of want and wage.

A living cloth, a blanket past and present laid a comfort still of ages past and ages yet to come. And onward still — aye, onward still —
the horse, the dawn, the quill.

Word. For. Word.

Provided they stick to their respective scripts, of course. And that neither party recognised that their opponent was also performing a script. If these conditions obtained then this would all work out just fine, and everyone would get to leave the court alive and mostly intact so they could return home safely to their families.

Who would also remain alive and mostly intact.

Not that The Patrician cared, precisely, about who lived or died. It was simply that, should anyone’s continued state of liveliness come to an abrupt end, the subsequent associated paperwork would become terribly tedious.

Forms had a way of multiplying in such circumstances, particularly when they involved an administrative correction of the population count. Hardly worth it for numbers below, say, a hundred.

And she did so dislike paperwork.

She was, in fact, very much looking forward to a relaxing weekend at her coastal retreat.

The Patrician’s role in overseeing negotiations between the representatives of two disputing parties, as neutral arbiter, was in principle, simplicity itself. Though the effort involved behind the scenes to achieve that principle was often considerable. Some days it would be something as world-shaping as disputed territory between two nation states, other days just a family squabble over who gets the controlling interest in Uncle Montague’s boiled sweet business.

The role appeared simple on the surface.

During a negotiation she would say nothing.

Not a word. Not a murmur. Not so much as an encouraging cough.

She would sit, fingers steepled, perfectly composed, her gaze intense and focussed; a presence so complete it circled calmly back into absence.

Around her, the performance would unfold exactly as planned: outrage sharpened for effect, denials polished to a plausible mirror sheen, historical grievances deployed with the careful reverence reserved for fragile family heirlooms or loaded weapons.

Concessions would follow; reluctantly offered and promptly reframed as acts of staggering generosity.

Each side would play its part to perfection. Back and forth like a tennis match with The Patrician as umpire. Some of the heavier shots coming with a subdued grunt of effort.

Which was unsurprising given the “Chairs of Negotiation” had been so skilfully constructed by her carpenters that the lightest shift in pressure of The Patrician’s feet on the high platform would advance or retreat the daggers concealed in the chair bases.

All of the theatre was merely for the benefit of the observers in the press gallery who were kept in employment recording the whole spectacle, colouring it in, and selling it to their respective circulations.

The Patrician approved of words, of scripts. Scripts meant predictability. Predictability meant an absence of surprises. And an absence of surprises meant, more often than not, an absence of bodies.

And so she waited and listened and watched.

Eventually — precisely when the last objection had thinned into a veneer of agreement; when both parties had reached that curious state in which compromise becomes indistinguishable from victory — then she would speak.

She always had to have the last words.

And those words would be, simply:

“Good. Then that’s settled.”

This, by longstanding tradition, concluded the matter entirely.

There would follow the fee.

As a neutral arbiter she was entitled to a cut. As a public servant she was obliged to be seen to be restrained in acceptance. Eighty percent of the fee would be deposited into the City Treasury, because she was, after all, a man of the people, and the centralised services her administration provided — security, sanitation, and the occasional executive deletion — did not come for free.

The remaining ninety percent she retained personally, as a modest token of appreciation. This was not, she felt, unreasonable given her considerable talents in creative accountancy.

Nor would it be squandered. She had never squandered a penny in all her life; she merely allocated resources according to a nuanced self-awareness of necessities.

Her tastes were simple, if hedonistic. She had a refined palate and an epicurean appreciation for her kind of food, her kind of wine, and her kind of flesh. Enjoyed in her kind of silence and her kind of privacy, that could only arise from being quartered at a suitable distance from other people and their perverted notions of morality and decency.

Her coastal retreat was sufficiently remote that any visitor could be observed hours before arrival. And, if required, discouraged just as efficiently.

Besides, she reflected, it was fair recompense for the peculiar responsibility that comes with ensuring that everyone said exactly what they were supposed to say, at precisely the right moment, and no more.

A misplaced word could lead to complications.

Complications led to paperwork.

And she did so dislike paperwork.

The difficulty that day, as it transpired, was not disagreement. The Patrician had long since solved disagreement. The difficulty was a man who would not perform it correctly.

He did not raise his voice when required. He did not deploy his outrage on cue.

It was troubling. The Patrician rarely encountered such things. It became obvious that this was a man who did not appear to know what he was supposed to want.

And this was pointedly unsettling.

As the weight of her foot increased, she wondered if that was almost a smile as the dagger tip pressed more insistently into him.

At this rate he was at risk of becoming unnecessary paperwork.

“Was he deliberately fluffing his lines, fully aware of the consequences?” she asked herself.

But more troubling, she found she had a slight nagging tug towards wanting him to limp away from this just so she could take him apart and see how he ticked. He did have the kind of bearing that would, had they met under different circumstances, probably have ended up with an invitation to a seaside dinner appointment.

We arrive by taxi, an old sedan that wobbles away down an extensive gravel drive after dropping us at his door. The American lives on his own in an expansive railway museum. An old station building, all oak floorboards and oak banisters. Polished oak, but old like MidWestern old. A patina of age. Dirty glass windows let in shafts of light where dust motes sparkle. The inside is dingy. Panels of stained glass add to the sense of age. All the interior doors are double doors with one leaf missing. We put our cases into the bedroom.

My girlfriend asks if I’m going to make Joel smell me all week. She’s right. I do feel grubby. The bedrooms have no bathroom. The only bathroom for guests at least is in the hall, near a staircase tat winds its way up to a gallery level.

I ask my girlfriend why the doors are not complete.

“Joel likes it that way.”

My girlfriend looks like Natassja Kinski but with T’Pol’s haircut. Her voice is soft with a slight huskiness. Light but not high pitched.

As well as the missing door leaf, there’s no ceiling on the bathroom. It’s a cubicle. A bathroom built into a long passimeter in what used to be the ticket hall.

There’s nothing in my wash bag except a toothbrush. I look for soap but only find an array of creams and lotions on the long oak dresser in the bathroom. I recognise some of these as belonging to my girlfriend. Very specific, expensive brands, a fingerprint of a person composed of a particular collection of beauty products. She’s been here before obviously. Spent some time here. I wonder when and why and what went on. But it’s not my place to pry. So I find the most soap-like of the products and start to shower.

I look up and over my shoulder to behind me. Though the water spray obscures my vision somewhat, I see a face watching me from the upstairs gallery. Two faces. Joel and my girlfriend. Standing close next to each other. I know they are more than acquaintances. A female voice begins an over dubbed song. There’s an insistent acoustic guitar

C1, C1, C1, D#, D#, D#, D, D, D, C#, C#, C#, repeating

A woman’s voice singing low soft words, “You can take my pain, you can take my brain, you can take my soul. You take everything.

You can take my tears, you can take my years. You can take life. When you took my hand.”

The voice gets higher and more emotional. The words bleed and elongate into an emotional wailing.

“Oh, I feeee-he--he-eeeee-eeeeee-eeeeel-eeeeellll everything.

Can’t take this pain, can’t stand this rain, gonna take my life and get outta here.”

I turn off the shower, wrap a towel and, whilst the song carries on, I walk around the shady interior of this station ticket hall-come-house-come-museum.

My girlfriend is there, leaning against a carved, fluted wooden pillar that supports the upper gallery. The area is in deep shadow. I move over to put my arm around her, and she puts her head on my chest. The arm that is around her squeezes lightly, reassuringly. She looks up. I feel the friction of her short hair on my chest. We kiss in that way that’s not exactly fiery passion but familiar, reassuring, loving, belonging. She has an air of sadness, melancholy. Only a touch though. Just enough to taste.

Joel is sat on the stairs at the bottom where the step is wider and has no bannister post. He is dressed in a dark green towelling dressing gown. He’s on an old fashioned Bakelite phone.

My girlfriend urges me to just walk past him. I hesitate, defer to British sensibility to wait for him to move or finish his call. My girlfriend nudges again “go past”

The song plays on, losing emphasis in this scene. The female voice wails on emotive. “…fi-aye-aye-aye-ayned the way-a-hayahay.”

I push past Joel, my girlfriend in tow.

She’s wearing a short dressing-gown, navy blue, tied at the waist with a wide satin ribbon.

As we step over Joel I know he could look up the bottom of my towel, up her short gown and see things that are supposed to be private and shared only between lovers.

I feel a building resentment to our host which comes into conflict with the respect I have for my girlfriend’s wishes and her privacy. It was her idea to come here.

We go up towards our room and Joel remains on the phone. He’s making a pointed effort to not acknowledge us.

But when we reach that gallery, our room has gone. The building has changed configuration. There are steps down now, onto a veranda that runs along the length of the upper floor and leads to more steps.

We are at the side of a lake and the covered walkway affords an excellent view of it.

I turn and embrace my girlfriend. The ribbon of her gown is loose and I hold her tight, pull her towards me by her waist. My towel is held up, pinched between our bodies and my hand drops from her waist to her bottom. I feel her reciprocate, her arm round me.

We kiss more passionately this time. Heads twisting as mouths cover each other, tongues explore lips, play a dance with each other. The music has drifted imperceptibly to piano now, that same insistent refrain, the voice merely suggestive vocalisations breathed out.

Towel and gown slip. Flesh touches flesh.

I feel weight against me, pushing me over. Her weight, pressing, insisting. I start to stumble backwards and look round to see if there's a bench or chaise lounge I can fall back onto, carrying her gently with me, letting her body find the contact it desires.

As I start to pay more attention to my surroundings out of logistical necessity, I see the veranda wraps round the L shaped building, and in the area below are platforms and tracks. There's a bench nearby for one to sit and look over the platforms.

Standing at one of the platforms below, there's a large LMS Princess class locomotive, gently steaming.

Except it’s liveried in British Standard Brunswick Green.

The shock of this woke me up.

Always at the most interesting bit of a dream. Damn!

In practice, policing reflects reality: officers are trained and conditioned by prevailing priorities, including the frequency and typical profile of incidents, which inevitably shapes how situations are assessed in real time. If a reported stabbing is misread as something less serious, that failure is not a neutral procedural error but a consequence of how judgment is directed in practice, including through institutional focus and cultural cues. As has been highlighted elsewhere this is often associated with politically framed priorities.

The question, therefore, is not ‘do such influences exist’, nor is it ‘should they exist’, but whether current training and expectations ensure that life‑critical risks are consistently recognised and acted upon as justice demands.

Even with a positivist view like Hart, law derives its force from social acceptance and institutional power, “policing by consent”. This means enforcement reflects political choices about which ‘norms’ deserve coercion through the creation of law.

Current thinking on jurisprudence is aligned with Alexy, sitting somewhere between Naturalism and Positivism. He does not collapse law into morality — he says unjust laws can still exist as law, though extreme injustice undermines their validity. Which is the situation we are facing today. Amplified, as it is, by the power of social media.

This is not an abstract concern: it is visibly manifesting in the United States today, where national policy priorities and political rhetoric are directly shaping day‑to‑day policing, from protest response to immigration enforcement and the allocation of resources. Debates over reform, defunding, and public safety further illustrate how enforcement is being re‑directed in line with ideological and political pressures rather than any settled, neutral conception of justice. Just in the other direction from us in the UK at this moment in time.

Does the way law is enforced genuinely align with any defensible concept of justice, or does it merely reflect the prevailing political manifesto?

The questions are uncomfortable. The answers, given current political direction, may be more uncomfortable still.

And for what it’s worth, Dworkin is American, Hart is British and Alexy is German. Their opinions are not rooted in a single culture, though Europe and America share certain legal principles.

I’m going to push back slightly on the idea that institutions can be “completely at odds with public opinion.” Not because that idea is misplaced, but because the concept of “public opinion” itself is much less stable than such phrasing suggests. It isn’t a single, measurable quantity. It’s something more like… a breathing entity that shifts across regions, within contexts, and between individuals. It is often internally inconsistent and highly sensitive to framing. There isn’t anything there which can be objectively assessed.

Jurisprudence has long recognised this problem. Legal systems don’t and can’t simply track public opinion, because there’s nothing coherent there to track. Sure there are some clear cases where consensus is obvious, such as this one in the news now with the police appearing to treat accusations of racism more seriously than a violent stabbing. But even approaches to creating legal system that emphasise the social grounding of law treat public attitudes as something to be interpreted and mediated through principles and reasoning, not aggregated and followed blindly or without consideration of impact.

The law constructs an objective framework of its own: one based on process, evidence, and justification. That framework necessarily operates on a different timescale. What may appear clear-cut in the moment can take months or years to resolve precisely because the system is doing something more demanding than reacting instinctively. It is building a justification that can withstand scrutiny, appeal, and reinterpretation across multiple levels of appeal and counter appeal and higher sovereign and even supranational courts.

That gap becomes even clearer at the level of practice. In the heat of the moment, a police officer cannot reasonably be expected to act within a universal, fully worked-out, objective framework. Decisions are made under pressure, using incomplete information, usually in rapidly developing, emerging, situations. That’s why they’re CALLED “emergencies”. This is exactly why operational guidance exists: to provide structured heuristics that translate abstract and highly formal legal principles into something usable in real time. The fuller objectivity of the law can only emerge later. The guidelines exist to protect elements of due process.

But that also means operational guidance is not a fixed thing. It begins to resemble a pendulum, continually adjusting, pushed and pulled by the collective breath of a fragmented society, each part registering its own sense of grievance and injustice. The pressures acting on it are real, but uneven and often contradictory, so the movement is never fully stabler predictable. Crucially, that movement is not instantaneous. The pendulum does not swing the moment pressure is applied. There is always a time lag between shifts in social sentiment, their recognition within institutions, and their eventual expression in guidance, policy, and case law.

That delay is not a flaw; it is part of what allows the legal system to maintain coherence. Immediate responsiveness would collapse the legal system into volatility. The lag creates space for reflection, for evidence to be gathered, and for competing claims to be weighed.

At any given moment, the system may appear out of step with parts of the society it serves, not because it is wholly “at odds,” but because it is just operating on a different timescale. That’s not to say protest is futile, it’s vital in order to check over-swing.

Seen in that light, “public opinion” begins to look less like a measurable standard and more like a kind of informal, ever-present court running in parallel with the formal legal system. But unlike actual courts, it has no procedural safeguards, no evidentiary threshold, and no duty of consistency or care. It delivers rapid judgments, often on partial information, shaped by visibility, emotion, and narrative. I would say thank goodness it has no power of sentence, but upon reflection it actually might to some degree. If not at the level of an individual convicted, then at the level of social shunning, reputational damage, public dissent, protest, disorder even. The same mechanics of a democratic society as pushes the pendulum from another direction. Non judicial consequences.

In its most accelerated form, the court of public opinion becomes something like “trial by TikTok”: immediate, performative, and highly reactive. Its influence is real, but it operates on a completely different logic to the law itself.

If anything, the more meaningful question is whether institutions are engaging properly in this process. Are they making their reasoning visible, testable, and open to challenge? Or are they assuming their authority speaks for itself. I think the answer is obvious with Starmer, but I don’t think for one second it started with him

Because in the end, legitimacy doesn’t depend on perfect alignment with public opinion but on maintaining confidence in the processes that mediate it. And that confidence I would say is showing cracks.

We can’t police by consent if there is too much dissent. Worse, the danger arising if executive body tries to enforce that consent.

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No metrics, no segments,
no dialled-in appeal —
just a kick in the chest
and a need to feel real.

No asking permission,
no checking the crowd,
just turned up truth
turned it up loud.

Edges left jagged,
no smoothing the seams,
not packaged in polish,
not filtered through dreams.

Clash class.

It found who it needed,
no chase, no demand,
you heard it or didn’t.
Whatever. Truth lands.

No watered-down message,
no sweetening bite —
Music that caught you
pulled your chest tight.

Not everyone’s language,
not everyone’s tune —
If it’s under your skin
it stays there, immune.

Before all the autotune,
before all the push,
before em-pee-three,
and streaming and mush.

London was calling.

Calling from margins,
from rooms, in the dark,
from the space between spaces
where sound left its mark.

From battered speakers,
through smoke, through brew —
in places that mattered
to me and to you.

When punks started to care,
what could they do?
Spit images, words,
cut gritty, kept true.

Futures felt bleak,
for Thatcher-day youth —
all the joking and music
spoke a far louder truth.

Not chasing a market.
No clean point of view —
News wired through funk:
if you knew, you knew.

I stumbled across an MP3 version that was lurking in my library, tagged ominously as “Alto MP3”, an encoder I don’t recall ever using.

So I did the sensible thing and checked the Apple Digital Master instead. Yes, that was better. Cleaner. More respectable.

But something still isn’t quite right about it.

The tom-toms are muted, and the kick drum is almost apologising for itself. Like someone’s told Topper “keep the noise down a bit, mate.”

It’s just not how I remember it at all.

I remember a pulse. Low and insistent. Cheekily playful but with a steady, living groove that pressed into the room like a gatecrasher.

A track with feeling. With weight.

Missing that pumping beat I associate with throwing it on the hi-fi in the early 90s when we were making out like the early-80s teenagers we no longer were but was still the shape of our spirit.

I’m half-tempted to see if I have the CD still in the archive box.

Though it may have been “allocated”.

Know Your Rights, right?

It was my ex-wife’s, technically. An early birthday gift when we were first dating — a triple box set. I knew she’d love it. She’d lost her 33s in a previous break up. A bad one. Not just emotionally messy but physically destructive by the sounds of it.

Violent. Drink and drugs in the mix.

She was expecting.

Was.

Changed by his hand.

He’s dead now. And however much the liberal, humanist part of me wants to frame it as a life gone wrong in complex ways, to label him as a troubled man, all I can say is: good fucking riddance. I hope it came before he had the chance to do the same to someone else.

I’d wrapped the box set up in a colourful John Lewis’s towel with a hippo on it. She’d once said she liked it when we were out shopping. An off-hand comment.

It’s a favourite trick of mine: layering something carefully considered under wrapping that looks shallow, even thoughtless. Affection disguised as mild disappointment.

I don’t know why I do that.

Maybe to amplify the high by creating an artificial dip first?

A slightly dangerous tactic, probably.

Could easily misfire.

Often has.

I don’t know where the box set is.

The towel… that’s still in the cellar, wedged behind the hot water cylinder as an extra layer of makeshift insulation.

Ah, the practical mechanics of a break up.

The quiet, methodical, inventorying of a shared life.

That's how these things should be done, right?

The division of the music collection, of the books from the shelf.

Of the assorted glassware, acquired during however many decades you were together, each carrying a feint residue of some good night out — purloined from bars, gigs, pubs — all probably closed or renamed now. In fact I know for sure they are.

And then the unexpectedly fierce negotiations over things that, to anyone else, would look like nothing at all.

Like the badly drawn stick-figure crayon picture of the family that spent 14 years living on the fridge door. Held there by a sun-faded magnet from a life-faded “summer” holiday on a beach in Kent…

I won that one —

She kept the drawing. And the magnet.

That may be why Car Jamming sounds so different now.

Not just remastered or rebalanced or digitally fucked up and sanded down like everything else in modern life. Everything made lighter, less anchored, more portable, less real — striving to be noticed amongst an increasingly noisy world.

What gave it weight back in the day?

A particular room?

A particular sound system?

A particular shared … activity?

I expect I’ll find that Clash CD at some point.

Or maybe I’ll get lucky and come across some 33s in a local charity shop.

That would be a turn up for the books.

Maybe that will bring back the drums?

But I don’t expect it would restore everything.

I’m not sure what could.

I can guess.

Maybe the real difference I can hear is me?

Or maybe someone doesn’t know how to mix records like they used to?

A train passes on the nearby line.
The dull, distant roar of cars on the motorway.
The shoosh of an aircraft bringing travellers home.

A siren.

A voice on the street out front.
A laugh,
animated speech in a language unknown to me.

The bang of iron on iron as a garden gate closes.
The soft insistence of a microwave beep.
The rustle of a vixen nosing through leaves behind the shed.

The constant thrum of the extractor fan.

A firework blooms, distance softened to a whump.

Drip, drip —
a leaky tap into the water butt.

The quiet flex of tree bark.
The sound of plants reaching up out of their beds.

My own heart beating.

This is what others call dark.

A neighbour’s floodlight glaring.
The soft halo of garden lamps.
The moon, unignorable overhead.

My phone screen.

Embers dimming in the barbecue pit.
The stars, fixed and far away.

My own heart beating.