So I see a Mr Reckless has defected to UKIP on the eve of the Tory party conference.

Mr Reckless ... the stuff of cheap fiction. Which, of course, it is.

On the rebound from John Latta's Ashbery post - consolation for my own daily errancy. A couple of weeks ago a student asked: "How many books are you reading?" gesturing to the piles on the various desks behind me plus the several volumes lying next to my cup & register.

I began to explain & realised the further I went the worse it sounded (the old adage of "don't begin a new book until you've finished the one you're currently reading" echoing down the decades). In desperation I tried out the analogy of planes stacked before landing - which is more or less accurate.

That's pretty much how it is - on any given day I have two or three books 'in the air' as, for instance, today: Bunting's Collected, Keith Waldrop's new one (The Now Forever) and Davenport's Geography of the Imagination (for the Ruskin essay). Quite why, I'm not entirely sure: hope that they will kick start some writing? A certain quality in the day? A mood, a scent, an inkling? Or simply the comfort that comes in having some words to hand?

& who knows what the eye might alight on? This, perhaps:

My tongue is a curve in the ear

('Villon', Bunting)

A line that transforms the day.

The walking bug is getting serious. First, the purchase of a new pair of boots a month ago (La Fuma, excellent); today, a rucksack - more accurately what's now called a 'day pack' - (Eastpak Wyoming, dark blue with a leather base, does all I need).

The point being, if I walk up to the Pain Quotidien of a weekend morning I need somewhere to stow the baguette & croissants leaving the hands & arms free. QED.

Casting my mind back, I think the last one I bought was in Bristol c. 1990? These days E. uses it for Scouts.

Do I miss the pool? Sort of. Yet walking offers other pleasures - fresh air, variety (not simply the soles of the feet of the person in front), & a rhythm that seems to fit with the wandering mind.

This morning I see two crows on the pavement fighting over an empty nutshell. Shrieks, wing flapping, pecking. A pointless argument over nothing.

No ... I'll leave it at that.

In the beginning you make a mess but tell everyone you've tidied things up. Years later the mess has got worse so you come back to 'tidy up' and make an even bigger mess. More years go by and the mess has started to spread further and further. Some mess is even turning up on your doorstep which makes it Real Mess. You realise that the people who lived in your mess have now learnt how to make mess of their own and have started exporting it. So you decide to have another go at tidying up except now no one quite believes this will do anything other than make the mess even worse and - more worrying still - who, now, can tell the difference between mess and more mess and even more mess: 'your' mess, 'their' mess, 'our' mess ... ?

"That's a fine mess you've gotten us into, Stanley" as Oliver Hardy used to say.

Bring on the clowns.

The 7:30 am now routine morning walk around the school neighbourhood before shouldering my bag of responsibilities & going in.

Today, turning into the home strait, I see a colleague in the Music Dept., open-necked shirt, smoking a cigarette. I greet him & we shake hands. He explains he's trying to give up the habit - but he likes a smoke while out on a walk. Doesn't make sense, but there it is. He shrugs.

Although I don't smoke, I can understand his dilemma. We talk about the pleasures of an early morning stroll - the houses still more or less asleep, the bird song, the fresh chill to the air.

I explain that I walk my dog - at which he nods & looks around. The joke is, of course, I have no dog. Then the penny drops & he laughs.

I begin to head back towards my car. "Our secret" I say conspiratorially, looking over my shoulder. He nods & drags again on his cigarette.

As I walk to the car I'm thinking about this strange 'brotherhood' (sisterhood, too, is possible but I haven't yet encountered any women) drawn by the morning. What compels us to find this little space (a mere 10 ... 15 ... 20 minutes or so)? To think, to wander, to 'commune' with the spirits of the air - or simply to prove we're not completely at the mercy of someone else's schedule?

Whatever it is, it does me a power of good.

... try as I might, I can find very few arguments as to why Scotland would want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The very sight of Cameron, Milliband & Clegg crossing the border would be reason enough to say 'get lost!'

If Scotland does break away, I wonder whether the Flemish community here might see it as a kind of precedent. & that scenario is another story ...

Here's a thought ... has anyone heard - concerning the Scottish Referendum - any arguments other than financial/ consitutional?

Reading the current LRB there are some very interesting questions raised as to what nationhood really means in the current world. Global business has, effectively, destroyed any true frontiers. The perilous state of - say - Irish, Greek & Italian economies mean that any sense of patriotism is severed from your currency. So what is left ...? (A beer, a flag, a costume?) What about a culture, a literature, a sense of shared belonging?

The weighing in of Big Business (banks, companies, entrepreneurs etc.) merely confirms the shift of power. Am I alone in thinking that whatever the vote - a Yes or No - it will (really & truly) change nothing for the real stakes have shifted elsewhere.

The old joke - what does a Scotsman wear under his kilt? Zizek would no doubt take this as emblematic of the current situation: the frisson of obscenity in the unveiling of the true mechanics of politics. The true obscenity is that we knew all along & were able to simulate scandal.

In other words a load of bollocks.

"It’s going to be a terribly artificial book" says the agent for Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins concerning the forthcoming unauthorised biography of the two Bake Off presenters.

What else could one expect?

"Music is a sacrament" - yes, yet another fatuous statement by the U2 front man Bono (said in the same breath as he argues music is not for free).

As if he'd know anything a) about music & b) sacraments. Another example of crass rock star speak, mouthing & thereby debasing values that certain people take very seriously indeed.

Today I am one of the 'lucky ones' to receive - at no direct financial cost - the new U2 album in my iTunes library. Such flagrant marketing disgusts me as well as the invasion of basic privacy. What presumption that I would want to listen to this.

I loathe U2 & Bono in particular (the affected shades, the tax evasion, the handbag ads, the puffed up stadium rock, the sense of entitlement to voice his opinions on behalf of The Adoring World ... ). Why would I want to have one byte of their music occupying space in my iPod? What next? Are we now to accept that Apple will deposit material (audio, verbal or other) in our computers? This is a distinctly worrying new trend (think politics, think religion, think ...).

Where to find some digital disinfectant ...

... I realise that the Dr Who post runs the risk of sounding deliberately out of sympathy with The Times - the sort of knee-jerk reaction to anything 'Now' with an It Was So Much Better Then. Hey! Chill out grandpa! So to refine the argument a little ...

My Dr Who watching years were mostly those of the Jon Pertwee & Tom Baker incarnations. I've been revisiting them with my younger daughter via the non-UK iPlayer (rip-off that it is ...). If anything they've gained in second viewing - the 50-year old self appreciating qualities missed by the child/adolescent self.

For me, what makes that era of Dr Who of interest is the utter lack of concern for popularity.* The programmes were not announced as 'cult' television. There were no pre-broadcast puffs. Blue Peter did not have items demystifying the special effects or a new creature. I sense that the people writing the series were drawing their inspiration from earlier Dr incarnations, the Sci-Fi genre as a whole & their own particular preoccupations & concerns. To put it another way, the creative energy was earthed. Not - as now - in television centre planning & strategy meetings (with that ever-ready eye to marketing).

Furthermore, the programmes were so obviously low budget. Watching now (2014) it is so evident how clunky the props, costumes & robots were. However - & this is the key point - this in no way impeded the imaginative & frightening power of the stories. Indeed, some of the most disturbing episodes were situated in 'real' suburban settings & the disjunction of ordinary & otherworldly was what proved so unsettling.

For me the whole catalogue of the Ghost Box label ...

... is proof of the continuing power of such an aesthetic. Limited means produce imaginative resources undreamed of by commissioning editors & CGI budgets. Plus, the visceral effect of texture. I've forgotten the name of the three-fingered Wayne Rooney lookalike in the Capaldi episode - about as disturbing as some Nintendo pixilated animation. Plastic through & through. Contrast this with the true ghastliness of a Cyberman, Sea Devil or Davros with his bulging veins & clawed hand. 

Or perhaps this is the real issue: Analogue versus Digital. Can a viewer brought up on digitised images respond to such material revulsions?** Or has whatever aspect of the brain-spine-heart wiring been deadened & now requires more blunt stimuli. (& I'm thinking here also of my loathing of Baz Luhrman's Gatsby, the pervasiveness of synth drumming, even the artificial ringtones, bleeps & cheeps that infest daily life. A colleague who teaches art laments the way that students find watercolour dull accustomed - as they are - to Adobe Photoshop screen brightness.)

Returning to that Capaldi first episode what potential lay there in embryo. Imagine a carefully built-up episode set - OK - in late Victorian London. Imagine various symptoms being detected amongst the population - strange skin defects, scaling ... Imagine unexplained fire debris, body parts, rooms completely gutted. Imagine a group of scientists setting to work in the underground sewers or cellars - the usual kind of scientific arrogance refusing to accept anything but a perfectly rational explanation. & then ... some kind of larvae ... a hatching ... but which (another key point) would NOT be shown but intimated - reaction shots ... sound effects ... & right when you think ... CUT! roll the title music & credits. Leave the innocent mind to spawn its own horrors until the next instalment.*** 

Instead of which we had the BIG EFFECT right from the off : a bloody great dinosaur lurching around the city. Question is: where the hell do you go from there? Top that! 

Pointless to ask what ....? how ...? but if .... then ... ? Internal logic has been sacrificed to the putative Audience Out There Who We Know Want ... But what about all those screaming at their screens No! No! No! ... & then, with a sigh, reaching for the off button. 

& of course this problem is not limited to Dr Who but runs right through mainstream broadcasting. 

Knock knock

Who's there?

Dr 

Dr Who?

You - you've been doctored

The old joke - how unfunny ... but how very true. 

_______

* My deep dislike of Friends was confirmed the day I learned that recordings of the show were constantly interrupted as scriptwriters asked the audience whether a joke was funny or not. What utter lack of courage & integrity. Could anyone imagine Monty Python emerging from such conditions? 

& by such a logic, how will we ever get anything truly new or surprising or life-transforming? 

** Although I lack the necessary technological know-how I'd even suggest the film resolution. Poorer quality television actually creates atmosphere & a sinister suggestiveness. Whereas cinemascope style clarity is the visual equivalent of vanilla ice cream. 

*** Anyone thought of commissioning Iain Sinclair to write a series? No, I thought not. 

... that the virtues of the magnet may be destroyed by rubbing it with garlic ...

(Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos - as stated in Jefferies' Field and Hedgerow)