Couples

Putin has proposed to Obama, only moments after POTUS had ceased courting the King of Saudi Arabia. The pre-nuptial agreement drafted by President Putin awards the Sevastopol dolphins to the Russian navy (dolphins guard the Crimean naval base against deep-sea mines and alien frogmen), while the Ukrainians get to keep the sea lions which are also based there.

On camera, UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg refused to look directly at Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party and Clegg’s opponent in Wednesday night’s televised debate over Britain’s membership of the EU. Clegg looked away because he didn’t want to be seen viewing Farage as a fully credible interlocutor; but he couldn’t simply stare straight ahead or he himself would have been cast as the Westminster Village idiot. Nowhere else for his eyes to go but down, and downcast eyes made him demur; a blushing bride compared to the front-footed Farage, who was clearly keen to exercise his conjugal rights.

Clegg has much to be modest about, after nearly four years as DPM in a dubious government.

Meanwhile in Brighton, the pioneering couple looked like a pair of original Teddy boys. Not the young toughs who hijacked the Edwardian-style tailoring designed in the early 1950s as an ode to the joy of winning the war; more like the young toffs that the post-war frock coats and suede collars were first intended for.

Writer and actor Andrew Wale and guest house owner Neil Allard wore three piece whistles, complete with suede collared jackets and pin collar shirts, when shortly after midnight on Saturday 29^th March they entered the Music Room of the Brighton Pavilion (more Rococo than rock’n’roll) to become one of the first same-sex couples married under English law.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds stepped into a blaze of publicity so intense it turned night into day. The whole world was invited to their nuptials – except Nigel Farage.

Without even mentioning UKIP’s policy on gay marriage, Farage would only have to walk into the Brighton Music Room for it to be immediately apparent that he doesn’t fit in: the severe side parting (not even ironic); a whiff of tobacco smoke; lounge suit that says ‘pub lunch’ instead of ‘gastropub’.

If Farage was a guest house owner on Channel Four’s Three In A Bed (‘B&B owners throw open their doors and take turns to stay with one another’), he would lose hands down to newly married Neil Allard.

Come the general election, however, the frogman’s lack of polish may spit in the eye of Britain’s cultural elite.

That's All, Folks!

Streaked across the tiled floor, the blood of four young gunslingers sent into Kabul’s Serena Hotel to shoot up the celebrations (kill count: 9) for New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan. They themselves were later shot down by government soldiers; their bodies were photographed where they fell, then dragged out of the hotel in the early hours of Friday morning.

By now, Kabul’s Hotel-of-Terror is almost dog-bites-man. In June 2012, the Spozhmai Hotel was similarly shot to pieces at the start of another festive weekend (23 dead including five Taliban); in June 2011, the Intercontinental (21 dead). In the aftermath, the same spokesperson for the Afghan government, and the same spokesperson for the Taliban.

Not much for this youthful quartet to celebrate, knowing they would hardly live to see in the New Year.

With firearms hidden in their socks the Taliban boys had evaded the hotel’s security checks, hiding in the toilets until the time came to come out and blow the guests away.

A photo of their shoes – two pairs black, two pairs brown, all of them chunky, hunky things – shows they were not from Son of Rambo or Lord of the Flies. These youths were much older, if none the wiser.

Was there the smell of festive cooking, wafting in every time a hotel guest came in to use the loo? Or nothing but cleaning fluid and abrasive mutterings that the toilet stalls were still occupied; just what the hell was going on?

Just how the hell did you sit it out, boys, those hours of waiting for your lives to be flushed away?

What a waste. You could have been getting changed in there, waiting to go on stage in a rock’n’roll band; first night nerves every one night stand.

Easy to imagine a youthful play of tender and tough, of Mercutio’s contempt for his own life as well as others'; to recall Raskolnikov, even Alex and his Droogs. But for all I know, your actions had nothing to do with the modern condition. Perhaps you hated Hotel Mayhem – Serena: is someone having a laugh? – not because it was cheesy and a little bit Dubai; more that you were good ol’ country boys whose idea of the human race only stretches as far as your own clan, along with its racing horses and fighting dogs.   

Whatever the reason, whether or not you reasoned it at all, in youthful haste you’ve already left your one and only mark on the world: famous for 15 hours, topping the Reuters list early on Friday morning; washed away into the archives by Saturday evening.

And nothing else will ever become of you.

What's In A Name?

Glenn Ford (64) was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary on Tuesday 11^th March. Wrongly convicted for the murder of a Shreveport jeweller in 1983, at the time of his release Ford had been in custody for 30 years – most of that time awaiting execution on Death Row.

Glenn Ford was a Hollywood star. In 1958 he topped the list of ‘Box Office champions’. Ford came to the attention of police when it was discovered he was keeping leghorn chickens in the grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion. The police ordered the removal of the chickens.

Louisiana State Penitentiary is a prison farm built next to the Mississippi River on the site of former slave plantations. (Also known as Angola – where the original slaves originated, the prison property is bigger than Manhattan.) Inmates pick cotton, grow food crops and keep livestock – except maximum security prisoners including those on Death Row, who are kept in their 8’ x 10’ cells 23 hours a day. The temperature in these cells exceeded 125 degrees on 85 days between May and September 2011.

In Superman (1978) Glenn Ford played Clark Kent’s adoptive father, Jonathan. ‘Superman’ also happens to be the name of a Texan air conditioning company which recommends servicing your AC system every six months.

Outside the prison gates, Glenn Ford said how much he missed seeing his son grow up. Now his baby boy has babies of his own, he observed. Ford had not been outside his cellblock for seven years prior to his release.

Glenn Ford played an escaped convict in The Secret of Convict Lake (1951).

Glenn Ford was incarcerated in Angola when guards shot and killed 29 year-old escapee Tyrone Brown.

Glenn Ford campaigned for Ronald Reagan to become President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House when Glenn Ford was first sent to the prison house.

In 1950 Glenn Ford was born in California, where actor Glenn Ford’s actor-friend Ronald Reagan would later become Governor, before going on to become President.

Glenn Ford was born in Quebec in 1916. As a child he moved with his parents to Santa Monica, California.
Glenn Ford looked young for his age. Photographs issued at the time of his arrest suggest an overgrown boy with a 1970s-style moustache.

Glenn Ford was boyishly good looking. In westerns and war films alike, his small features affirmed that masculinity need not be brawny or brutish.

Jowly and overweight – he hadn’t been out of his cell block for seven years, Glenn Ford now resembles a middle-aged lady. With a lightweight beanie stretched over his head (Huck Finn’s Widow Douglas might wear it with her curlers in), when interviewed by WVLA-TV at the gates of Angola, Ford’s face seemed somehow emasculated.

After a series of minor strokes Glenn Ford died at his Beverly Hills mansion on 30^th August 2006, aged 90.

After almost three decades as a dead man walking, Glenn Ford has come back to life in the outside world.

Glenn Ford, ceci n’est pas Glenn Ford (look at the dark skin on his pinkie and you'll see it immediately).

Grief Beyond Compare

The not knowing was the worst, you will tell yourself later. But of course you did know all the time. Not as if an airliner can go missing; walk out without telling anyone, then turn up at the police station or pop back home after a name check on the radio.
Beijing International Airport: the Chinese woman in the white padded jacket; looks like Julia Roberts. Right now there’s an airline official on the phone to her – the phone painted with pink flowers (of course she knows it’s silly).
Like wind across a wheat field, her face spreads, widens into panic, grief, collapse – call it what you will, and anyway it looks strangely like a smile.
As she hears of the disappearance of flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing (239 people on board), what I’ve just done – looking at her, making notes and comparing – is just what padded-white-lady can’t do. She cannot see herself doing what she’s doing. She’s not now going to notice the something that doesn’t square with something else you’d expect it to match. News of loved-one-missing-feared-dead has rendered her existence incomparable, at least for the time being.
Being beyond compare – how exceptional it is, even for a moment. Until this very moment, padded-white-lady-in-waiting had been hanging around the airport lounge, window-shopping, people-gazing; killing time comparing this with that, him versus her……and look, there he is again.
At KL airport, back where the ill-starred started from, a chic geeky boy wears an Oasis T-shirt featuring a cartoon face-off between Noel and Liam Gallagher. Choosing to wear this T-shirt when he got dressed this morning, geeky boy was sort of saying: they’re a bit like me; I’m a little like them. It’s what he said, metaphorically speaking, out of the corner of his mouth. But now the news fixates him: straight ahead, full face; no scope for anything sideways-on.
Padded-white-lady is condemned to come back to this moment, over and over again. On one such occasion, recalling how she first heard about her lost love, she may also recall the Everly Brothers’ ‘Ebony Eyes’. Thinking about the 24 Chinese artists returning from an exhibition in Malaysia, who are also feared dead, geeky boy may liken the crash to The Day The Music Died. Or perhaps by then there will be a new K-pop song about Flight MH370. And in 12 months’ time surely a sociologist will have analysed the weekly flight paths of today’s Far Eastern professionals, comparing them to early-sixties East Coast suburbanites and their daily commute.
Over time, with increasing use of metaphor, even raw grief will metamorphose. It has to: my brief comparative study has shown that human nature abhors the incomparable.

Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow

The red tea lights are the same: outside Kunming railway station; inside the Maidan (square) in Kiev.

Lights lit in memory of 29 knifed to death on Saturday by Uighur separatists in south west China, and 77 killed during successful demonstrations against pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, who fled the Ukrainian capital on 21^st February.

Lively little lights to take away the stillness; unholy stillness which otherwise outlives removal of human remains.

Meanwhile in the Crimea, an Orthodox priest (just don’t say ‘Russian Orthodox’ to the wrong person) uses what looks like a washing-up brush to spray holy water on soldiers from both sides – Ukrainian security forces and troops from the Russian Federation.

The diplomatic situation seems too big for them; absurdly large like the hats on the heads of Black Sea sailors. While Russian infantry with chins tucked into dust masks are perhaps trying to hide their tender years; kissable mouths would give them away as conscripts.  

Yet any Ivan can easily become Terrible, should the situation demand it. Terrible as the knife-wielding posse which ran riot – slitting and stabbing – through Kunming station, Yunnan province.

On the periphery of the world economy, in far-flung provinces and narrow peninsulas, the slow pace of development can turn into its opposite at almost any moment; outrunning the most mercurial diplomat, turning gunboats and sabre-rattling into live ammunition and thousands of little red candles.