Two-Jags the Brave

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been universally praised by the psychiatric community for making public his struggle with bulimia nervosa whilst in office. Prescott's admission in an article for The Sunday Times to stuffing his face with burgers, chips and chocolates and vomiting them back up in times of stress has been described as "brave and courageous" and a positive example to men suffering from eating disorders - conditions more often associated with young women, models and actresses - who may feel too scared and ashamed to seek treatment. Prescott is also lending his support to a new NHS campaign aimed at raising awareness of eating disorders.

All this might have been enough for me to reassess my opinion of the man (I've never liked him) had it not been for the fact that his admission just so happens to coincide with the publication of his memoirs next month (in which we are promised the full details of his illness). To have a public figure, especially one as unashamedly masculine as Prescott, campaigning for such a stigmatised illness is a good thing and I would be churlish to deny it but it seems to me like a carefully calculated and cynical move to score brownie points with the public in the hope of shifting more units of his memoir, an impression reinforced by Mr. Prescott turning up on every news programme clutching said tome and being filmed casually flicking through its pages.

Exploiting his own health problems in this way does rob his admission of genuine bravery and nobility but, even so, there is no denying that generating publicity on eating disorders could encourage those suffering from such conditions, especially men, to put aside their embarrassment and seek help.

Prescott has, after all, done more than I have.

Stuff and... things

Bloggity bloggity blog blog blog... come on Steve, gotta' blog about something. Haven't blogged anything for over ten days; surely you can't be suggesting that nothing has happened in that time? Well, admittedly, not much has happened what with your last temp job assignment finishing last Friday and taking a bit of time off to investigate the work/accommodation situation in Glasgow, but that's not especially interesting, is it? It's not as if you've spent the time partying and whoring your way around the seedy underbelly of Oxford. Does Oxford have a seedy underbelly? Must do - everywhere does. Maybe that could be a little project for you.

Still, doesn't help with the immediate problem of not having much to say. I suppose you could mention your ongoing obsession with your Last.fm stats, especially since you discovered that damned eclecticism test and have been trying to listen to as many different genres as possible to bump your score up. Come on, you know you have eclectic tastes, you don't need validation from a bunch of database statistics. Tragic, really, and not worth sharing with the world.

You could talk about why you failed to note the passing of Charlton Heston the other week given the fact you often post photo-memorials for cultural figures. He was, after all, a genuine old-school movie star. You could have commented upon your ambivalence towards his death given the fact that, for example, he was a vocal supporter of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the 1960s but his latter day public advocation of gun ownership was deplorable; that and the fact that you never warmed to him as an actor despite his star status. True, he was in A Touch Of Evil, one of your favourite films of all time, but the reasons for it being one of your favourite films of all time have absolutely nothing to do with him. Anyway, it's old news now - no point in mentioning it.

Oh well, if you haven't got anything to blog about then you haven't got anything to blog about. Never mind, it's Sunday: why not make yourself a nice strong cup of coffee, curl up with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and listen to some Otis Redding... or Alban Berg... or Muddy Waters... or Fudge Tunnel... or Sly & The Family Stone... or Ramones... or Luke Slater... or... oh, just go and check your Last.fm stats and then decide. Pathetic. It really is.

Thou shalt always dance

Another Monday night and another gig in Oxford, this time to see the performance poetry/electro/hip-hop stylings of Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip.

They filled the stage with antique furniture - a desk, drinks cabinet, a battered armchair, old lamps with faded, frilly shades. Mr. Pip and Mr. Le Sac proved to be most congenial hosts, engaging in funny banter and bemoaning the fact that they had been given a complimentary bottle of wine but no corkscrew. At various points in the show one would sit back in the armchair to sup a glass of wine (once a corkscrew had been blagged from the bar) to allow the other to fly solo for a while. And the tunes, of course, were great and I had a jolly old boogie.

I had hoped that the crowd would be a little more animate than they were at the Fall gig a few weeks ago... Oh well. I'll grant you that Le Sac 'n' Pip have yet to release an album ("Angles", due out in May) and many people are only familiar with their hit single from last year Thou Shalt Always Kill. I confess that I had only heard three of their tracks before I went to the gig but that didn't stop me getting into all the other cool stuff they played that I didn't know. The rest of the audience, though... well, some of them did a half-arsed movement of the shoulders but they only sprang into life when that song came on.

What's the point of that? What's the point of going to a gig to hear only one song and not show any interest in the rest of the act's material. To be fair, the crowd did cheer and applaud between tracks but, jeez, if a self-conscious uncoordinated numpty like me can jiggle his bits to unfamiliar tunes then anybody can.

Sorry, but Oxford gig crowds are rubbish.

Springtime in England!

Even in England, with its unpredictably eccentric meteorological quirks, you don't expect to wake up in April in springtime to a sight like this out of your bedroom window:

Whacky old England.

Finally...

I did it, I finally did it: I finally finished reading that damned Shandy novel.

So... what to read next?

• Other Voices by Andrew Humphrey
• The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
• La Bete Humaine by Émile Zola
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Turn of the Screw / The Aspern Papers (Omnibus) by Henry James
• The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
• Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart
• Continent by Jim Crace
• Pesthouse by Jim Crace
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin
• The Major Works by Jonathan Swift
• Palm Sunday / Welcome To The Monkey House (Omnibus) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel by Lucy Fry, Heidi James and Kay Sexton
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Plays And Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Luis Bunuel: New Readings by Peter William Evans
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-95 by Tom Paulin
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now by William H. Calvin

Or maybe I'll watch some films for a bit.