Latest Essay: A Very Short Essay on Happiness

Latest List: Joyful Pieces of Popular Music

See also my articles for FILMIES at www.filmies.co.uk

LATEST ESSAY:

A Very Short Essay on Happiness

What was it Mr Micawber said? 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.'

There is great veracity in this vaguely socialistic sentiment from Dickens' most autobiographical novel; however, the getting of happiness would seem to involve just a little more than the marginal avoidance of penury. The extent to which happiness is a typical or actually rather more rare state of mind has seemingly always occupied us. Is my 'happy' state indeed simply one of elevated or asymptomatic mood, with the human condition rather more rooted in the dull, plodding absence of euphoria that is more appropriate to the evolutionary survival  of a biologically young species?

However, I would like to think we might all agree that happiness is to be very highly valued, at least as the oil for the existential wheels of our spoilt Western lives. As both Aristotle and the Dalai Lama have, I believe, correctly taught us, the central meaning of our lives is the pursuit of happiness, particularly if it is accompanied by kindness and good deeds (indeed, it may be impossible without them). And if you find this 'pursuit' unedifying or undignified, then identifying the sources of happiness in our lives is a sound alternative. I do not quite adhere to the Zen notion of 'letting go', of resigning peacefully to the individual limitations of life's moments, but Buddhism's concentration on the here and now holds powerful and measurable meaning for me, with its compassionate view of human foible.

Without happiness, our short allotted time on this earth becomes an exercise in continual futility, a kind of gruelling survival course without reward. The religious among us might disagree: happiness may await us elsewhere. As a humanist-atheist I must live in the here and now, seeking happiness where it exists or can be detected. The days when I am not happy are my own little hell on earth. My happiness is heaven bestowed; a gift to be perceived continuously or....even better... discovered lurking when little expected.

One caveat: happiness is at its best when acting as a sometime antidote to other no less useful emotions: fear, pride, lust and the like. One wonders what great artistic works might have been denied us, for example, had unhappiness been less common throughout the ages.

It may ultimately be futile to perceive happiness as a commodity that can be audited and added to......I am happiest when I feel valued and free, neither of which can be easily achieved by design......but here in any case are my own twelve kernels of happiness. Please feel free to disagree passionately. My apologies in advance for being quite so deliberately sweet; I'm in a good mood and the Ruby writing mantra is being put on hold for today.

• Live for the moment as often as you can remember to do so (this is not easy!); don’t dwell too much on the past.....don't plan ahead quite so much
• The glass is usually half full. Do count those blessings.
• Immerse yourself in something you love doing and that seems to make time melt away (as I am doing now).
• Concentrate on the positives in your work and career and try forget the rest (you will fail, but give it a go).
• Treat yourself occasionally.......but not to the point of spoiling the child within.
• Act happy: sing, laugh, lark about a bit
• Be a small part of something bigger and more important than you, whether it’s your work or some other enterprise. Contribute and sleep easy at night.
• Exercise within your own limits and eat and drink as well as you possibly can.
• Vary your regime a bit.......be spontaneously spontaneous.
• Be kind: always.
• Have something to look forward to. Anticipation is a wonderful drug.
• Audit the everyday things that make you happy........clean sheets on the bed, the smell of baking bread, your cat lying in the sun, the laughter of your children........

And to end: these are my other favourite quotes about happiness (to go along with that of the estimable Wilkins Micawber).

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open-
John Barrymore

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life-
Omar Khayyam

Latest list:

Joyful Pieces of Popular Music

Isn't She Lovely?   Stevie Wonder
What A Wonderful World   Louis Armstrong
Feeling Good  Nina Simone
Lovely Day Bill Withers
Sweet Disposition   The Temper Trap
Happy  Pharell Williams
Finally Ce Ce Peniston
Oh! What a Beautiful Morning   from Oklahoma
Top of the World   The Carpenters
Don't Stop Me Now   Queen

See my articles at new film review site www.filmies.co.uk

Latest essay:  Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV Drama?

Latest list: Greatest TV Drama Series

LATEST ESSAY:

Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV drama?

'Mr Barlow, are you the only teacher in this school?'

That was a question never asked of our venerable soap Chips during his seventy-eight years at the chalk face pre- and post-retirement, but maybe it should have been.

 Along with:

'Sir, have you always taught every single one of your neighbours' children?'
'Do you arrange it with the head to have like really small inner city classes of ten clever kids, innit?'

The 'Big Thre'e public services portrayed down the years in British TV drama are hospitals, the police and schools. Of these state education has been done a disservice in the area of broadcasting accuracy that the other two have to a much larger extent escaped (caveats are many of course, to include: mass murder suspect interviews minus solicitors, too many public wards with only two beds—the other bed always holding a grizzled but wise ancient with early onset dementia, and legions of garrulous maverick DCIs with drink problems and cast iron gut feelings. Indeed any nurse, doctor or police officer who is foolish enough to be reading this will be spitting exasperated opprobrium at the author and scribbling vehement lists).

In short, the commissioning TV companies clearly push at least some resources in the direction of research when they knock out their various dramatic crime/medical offerings. The audience is becoming more demanding in this regard. We know more and we are prepared to assert this.

Schools? They clearly never give it a second thought. The feeling appears to be, We all went to school, everybody knows what it's like, so let's just lob Barlow in the classroom with those six kids from Italia Conti and get them to rile the old buzzard for a few minutes in bad Mancunian/cod-street London/Italia Conti accents until they all leg it on the bell when he's half way through his poetry pentameter thingy. The fact that most of the viewers' children will be taught in classes of thirty and old Barlow won't live even remotely close to any of them because of the not inconsiderable fear of 'Teacher in Jeans with Wife and Unrestrained Pupils on Lager on Bikes' incidents never seems to cross anybody's mind. Furthermore that even the most frayed and frankly useless teacher has at least the tacit procedural support of the institution he works in to be able to dismiss his class on his own instruction is an artistic consideration too far for Auntie Beeb and the independent chaps on the other channels.

 And I know this how?

Well, twenty-five years at the chalk face, is how. A whole career living the dream that is teaching the teenagers of Britain.

And so I see, and shudder at: secondary school deputies suddenly become primary school heads (won't happen, not ever; that's like a horse turning into a squirrel); members of the public wandering onto school grounds to tap on classroom windows when security in British schools is akin now to the regimes variously established at places like Treblinka and Fort Knox in the past; concerned teachers visiting pupils' houses at night to voice their concerns about behaviour/progress/drugs habits/prostitution rings/messiah syndromes to blissfully unaware parents, where in fact you would attempt this on the average South London or inner Liverpool estate and risk a) being reported and sacked, or b) hung from a balcony and beaten with sticks.

School trips are supervised by a lone junior teacher with no first aider, and kids get drunk on the coach, and are rude to old ladies, and are noisy in the museum, and are inevitably lost and late and kleptomaniac and disinterested in the focus of their day. This is unfair, condescending bullshit if you really want to know—child-hating Blighty coming out in us like a rash. And why have a school tie and then fail to have kids with knots as big as your fist hanging ten inches below their chins, and tattoos of monkeys on their faces? After all, no teacher will ever notice, and fewer will do anything about it. Or hey, let's not have a uniform at all, like when we were at school in the Seventies!

Bad Kid always turns up for his detention, albeit reluctantly. In reality, bad kid never turns up for his detention and goes into the exclusion unit the next day for it. Fifteen-year-olds tell their mums they've got a free lesson, and just nipped the two miles home from school. Their next un-free lesson therefore started ten minutes ago. Scriptwriters, please listen: NO FREE LESSONS, NOT EVER! Smoking and fighting and flirting proliferate on the school playing fields Mr Gove has sold to Mr Barratt and Mr Bellway and their friends. Oh, and bike sheds! About 0.5% of children cycle to school these days, so forget your bike sheds and all that may go on behind them.

Teachers are either simpering posh girls/young fellows with hearts of gold and mildly condescending approaches, or ancient retainers well past their sell-by date, or rhino-skinned Neanderthals out of the Kes era, or bedraggled head teachers with lots and lots of pot plants in their offices and a villainous penchant for permanent exclusion for incidents such as paper aeroplane construction and excessive chewing gum use (do any of these types exist? Well yes, but so do TV executives and artistic directors who do not live in Islington).

And finally the pupils of TV High remain solidly the same old stereotypes trotted out in Grange Hill when Steven Poliakoff was a lad. These are: Vulnerable Thick Bully, Vulnerable but Nowhere Near as Thick Victim, Strange Kid with Artistic Powers Beyond the Imagining of the Frankly Stupid Teacher, Spiteful but Actually Vulnerable Tormentor Girl, Sporty Lad with blond hair, Stutterer, Smelly Girl, Fat Lad.

So who are the main culprits? Coronation Street and EastEnders (the latter merely reporting nonsense situations at Walford High but never setting scenes there) bestride this issue like two colossi—decade after decade of utter nonsense--but at least have the excuse that they deal with a lot of other stuff beyond the school gates. Waterloo Road is in this respect an abomination therefore, a dramatic construct out of the fifth circle of hell—an accuracy void filled instead with putrid caricatures and obtuse rankness, episode on episode, an affront to anybody that ever worked in a school or studied in a school, which means absolutely all of us. Skins simply redefines the teenage years as a Bacchanalian feast had by twenty-three year-olds, and is practically irrelevant in this regard but no less inaccurate. And the much loved and lost Teachers, which pretended to be a bit of a comedy but dressed itself in the clothes of noir C4 realism: it too must hold its hand out for six of the best. I do not include sitcoms for their comedic obviousness precludes any call for accuracy, indeed warrants anti-accuracy, so stay in your seats Bad Education, Please Sir, The Grimleys, and The Inbetweeners (I taught at James Buckley's secondary school, and a cocky little thespian poppet he was, too).

There are more offenders, but we have summoned and caned the ringleaders.

But how can we account for this complacency? Why so bad? Easy: public schools and the wrong idea of audience.

Having alluded to the intrinsic nationwide knowledge of the state education system I find myself having to apologise for a distortion, for only a minority of those commissioning editors, directors and scriptwriters mentioned have been within a single metric mile of a British comp in their entire lives, and only then to shudder a little as they pass on the way to a dinner party at Kit and Tessa's in Canonbury (they're doing a bouillabaisse and there will be Montrachet). In other words the very people putting the shows together have at best a vague notion of what state schooling is like, and at worst a contempt for the need for the accuracy that would be demanded by people just like them when 'doing public school', and a contempt for any corresponding desire for authenticity among a vast state-educated audience.

Snobbery then and laziness.

Well, not entirely. Ann McManus is the principle creator of Waterloo Road, along with her Shed TV chums. She was educated far from the dreaming spires and, moreover, taught English in an inner city Glasgow school. She therefore knows so, so much better. Her treachery is a simple and timeless one: she sold any good early intentions to the cheapening devil of popular prime-time broadcasting, got rich, moved to Islington. And who can blame her? She now allows others to re-imagine her teaching days with crass inaccuracy, plus monkey tattoos, defending the silly excesses her show depicts by asserting that everything Waterloo Road trots out has happened at some point in time at a school somewhere in Britain.

Drama as collage then, as anthology or tick list. Shakespeare missed a chance, and we another master work: his Royal Englishmen Summer Revue, in which Richard III appeals in vain for the same horse injured Prince Hal rides from Shrewsbury on his way to victory at Agincourt on the 'morrow, is lost to us forever.

One exception though, and I do mean just the one. In 1995 C4 put out Hearts and Minds, a Jimmy McGovern piece that featured Christopher Eccleston as a young teacher fighting his corner in a 'troubled' Liverpool comprehensive. The research was clearly done well (McGovern himself had taught). There appeared, for example, a scene about the marking of exercise books ('All they want is a big tick!'), so precise in its delivery and so peculiar to the profession that the stamp of authenticity lay all over it. Who knows, they may have even consulted a teacher at some stage who was still working within the profession. I urge you to see what's left of this piece if at all you can.

Our cinema has fared somewhat better in all of this over several decades, at least in its high points. Kes particularly, and Rita, Sue and Bob Too and Notes on a Scandal have much to recommend them, notwithstanding Judy Dench's frankly ludicrous lesbian spinster hell hound in the last of these. Across the pond, our American cousins, though not blameless (Glee!) extend a general instinct for veracity to this problematic medium, with Friday Night Lights and The Wire, among others, shining a direct and mainly honest light into the mysterious, fraught landscape of the classroom.

On our side: Barlow, itching powder, and an audience treated worse than sickly playground truants—with lazy condescension and a TV centre sneer.

William Ruby

LATEST LIST: 

Greatest TV Drama Series

The Sopranos
Boys From the Black Stuff
The Wire
NYPD Blue
Six Feet Under
Twin Peaks
Our Friends in the North
The Shield
State of Play
The Monocled Mutineer

Latest Essay   Sheer Lunacy: A Brief History of the Naming of Jack the Ripper Suspects

Latest List:  The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)

Sheer Lunacy: a Brief History of the Naming of Jack the Ripper Suspects

Goulston Street's putative Cockney double negative graffito 'The Juwes are the Men that will not be Blamed for Nothing', erroneously erased before it could be photographed by the aristocrat idiot Sir Charles Warren—at that time Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and fully twelve years before his crass and catastrophic battle command at Spionkop in the Boer campaign (a massacre of expeditionary troops as singularly dreadful and complete as any in British military history, involving a bullet to the throat for my Lancashire Fusilier great grandfather, his reputed hilltop evacuation by Mahatma Ghandi, and the subsequent terminal tuberculosis that he passed to most of his large, poor family)—should maybe better read today 'The romantic poets, eminent doctors, second heirs to the throne of England and the British Empire, castratos, Satanist pamphleteers, internationally renowned artists, elderly men and young women are the men that shall not be Blamed for Nothing', so fraught with self-perpetuating bullshit has the naming of Jack the Ripper suspects become.

My favoured suspects? It's got to be Eddy, effeminate eldest son of the Prince of Wales, teaming up with supreme late Victorian artist Walter Sickert as the front and back end respectively of a deranged pantomime horse, galloping loose through the mean streets of Whitechapel and bent on terrible harm. Just think how easily it would have been for them to evade detection during their wicked autumn spree?

Ripperologists are of course completely bonkers, pushing their theories built on sand, seen through the dense smoke and fog of one hundred and twenty six years. Several have been as certifiable as their dotty suspects. And I must admit here and now that I am indeed of their kind. Yes, I am also a Ripperologist! I thrill to that particular chase. Indeed I even have my own suspect, although more of him later; who knows, I may even convince you. Oh, I'll never prove anything—that's the point of all of this nonsense; the sum total of zero forensic evidence will ever be brought forward in support of a single theory or suspicion. And what a crestfallen and bedraggled crew the Ripper community would become no sooner had irrefutable proof been wheeled out to the light of day. Book deals: cancelled. Walking Tours: nobody turns up. Mystique: evaporates.

And so while we cast our eyes along the police line-up of the so-far named, let us not forget the FBI's highly respected and generally widely accepted sexual serial killer 'attributes' that would pertain to these particular crimes. As a clearly frenzied or 'disorganised' murderer of strangers in public places Jack was very highly likely to have:

• Lived and worked in that particular part of the East End
• Been working-class and to have held down menial or low-paid work
• Shown outwardly 'normal' or at least unremarkable behaviour but been somewhat socially inadequate
• Have been of fairly limited IQ
• Been between the ages of 25 and 40
• Exhibited regular nocturnal habits

Now then, to some of the 'prime' suspects. I will deal with them as one solid crass block, with nonsense piled on top of risibility:

Montague J. Druitt: educated at Winchester and New College Oxford, teacher, excellent cricketer, almost certainly homosexual and possibly implicated in certain 'shenanigans' at his school, never lived in the East End, found drowned in the Thames Christmas 1888, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. James Maybrick: erroneously suggested as the author of the infamous forged 'Diary Of Jack the Ripper', wealthy Liverpool shipping merchant, never lived remotely near the East End, 50 years-old, murdered by his wife in 1889 in Liverpool, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Michael Ostrog: Oxford educated petty criminal, possibly qualified as a doctor, 55 years-old, never fully resident in the East End, remarkable resemblance to double-taking James Finlayson from the Laurel and Hardy films, NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Sir William Gull (and Masonic Friends): Queen Victoria's personal physician, Governor of Guy's Hospital, an ancient 72 years-old, never resident even remotely near to the East End (unless you count Mayfair), NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Aaron Kosminski: Polish Jew occasionally working as a barber in the East End, 23 years-old, perpetually confused with other named suspects like Nathan Kaminsky, some other bloke called Kosminsky, and David Cohen, all of whom were variously insane and institutionalised at one time or another, a much better suspect than the fellows already listed but apparently so gaga and dribbling that women would cross the street and yell on spotting him rather than engage the guy in banter or negotiations of a sexual nature, so NOT JACK THE RIPPER. George Chapman: 22 years-old at the time, Polish by birth and a conman by proclivity, later murdered three women by poisoning, so modus operandi-discrete and therefore NOT JACK THE RIPPER. Francis Tumblety: 55 year-old Irish-born mountebank who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada, identified living just about everywhere other than London's East End, definitely NOT JACK THE RIPPER. J. K Stephen: Cousin of Virgina Wolf, Old Etonian, poet, tutor to the aforementioned Prince Eddy, the right sort of age at 28...................can we stop now?

 Do you see the problem? It goes on and on. And yet rather than simply dismissing all this as either authorial license gone mad or a pressing need to sell books in an era of celebrity, we really should address it for what it is: intelligent (in the main) men (in the main) ignoring all the tested and established tenets of police investigation and scientific criminology in order to add gloss to a series of murders that although horrendous in nature, were limited in number and historically mundane. Stood alongside Sutcliffe's paralysing six-year hold over whole swathes of northern England or the deadly and incomprehensible machinations of Doctor Harold Shipman, the Jack the Ripper murders start to look like rather small beer.

Of far greater significance was the effect of the 1888 Autumn of Terror on urban social policy and the plight of impoverished women; the Salvation Army and common and garden charity itself, philanthropic and state-sponsored housing and slum clearance, enhanced workers' rights, the Suffragette movement, and maybe even eventually the National Health Service and the Welfare State owe at least a small nod of begrudging recognition to the Cockney madman and his knife.

A light got shone at last where Saucy Jack did play.

William Ruby

Appendix

And my man?

Of the local working-class men identified at any stage as suspects only Kosminski and Joe Barnett (final victim Mary Kelly's estranged boyfriend) have been given anywhere near the sort of retrospective scrutiny afforded the motley crew of posh blokes and weirdoes listed above. Barnett's candidacy does not garner too much support: rather he appears to be simply a daft local lad (think Ricky from EastEnders, with Mary as Bianca) caught up in dreadful events. And yet one young local bloke has been seriously overlooked, not least because he was neither glamorous nor particularly notorious during his own lifetime.

Jacob Levy simply hid in plain sight. He is by far the most likely Ripper, but Ripperologists think him simply too boring and obvious to be true. Here goes:

• 32 years-old
• local butcher
• nocturnal (both through work and habit)
• previous low-key criminal activity: some aggression and anti-social behaviour
• lived all his life in the Aldgate area of the East End
• lived/raised on dividing line between Met and City police areas (see Double Event if bothered to investigate the significance of this: I won't bore you)
• anatomical knowledge gained through work consistent with very quick removal of 'trophy' body parts from victims in poor light in early mornings
• able to be bloodied and carrying knives without alerting too much attention
• killings Friday/Saturday morning/Bank Holiday; as a Jew, Levy observed the Sabbath and had more freedom from work at these times
• worked on Butcher's Row on Aldgate High Street as a 'jobbing butcher' (having apparently lost his own family business), directly opposite St Botolph Church where the prostitutes of the area used to parade, in sight of his family house on Middlesex Street, and two minutes walk from Mitre Square where Cath Eddowes was murdered on the night of the Double Event
• Syphilitic. Likely to have contracted the disease from a local working girl. Did this give him his motive?
• Cutting off tips of noses of victims consistent with revenge disfigurement: syphilis often takes the nose first.
• Graffito and piece of Eddowes apron found in building where Levy's brother lived at the time, and consistent with a man wanting to get home to safety but not wanting to go straight home and be observed doing so. Did he beg his brother for help that night?
• Family grew increasingly concerned about his aggression, nocturnal wanderings and unaccountable absences
• Committed to an asylum eighteen months after the final murder (of Kelly)
• Possibly physically incapable of murder in that final eighteen months due to the syphilis, so no more killings
• The Hyam Levy eye-witness account near Mitre Square. Hyam distantly related to Jacob and also worked in the local Jewish butchery trade. Said victim was three inches shorter than the man who almost certainly became her killer. Eddowes was 5 foot, Levy a titchy 5 foot 3 inches. Police sources continued to suggest for some years that the Ripper was positively identified by a 'relative' who would not give evidence against one of his 'own kind'.
• The witness who saw Kelly take her final client into Miller's Court on the night she died described him as a short Jewish-looking individual. The same witness told police he saw the same man a few days later.....on Middlesex Street!
• Widely suggested recently that the killer may have strangled and incapacitated his prostitute victims as they knelt to perform fellatio. As a very short man, was this Levy's essential advantage?
• Mary Kelly was by all accounts a 'big girl'. As the only victim with her own private room and bed, did this give little Jacob all the physical advantage he needed? Many Ripperologists believe Mary was attacked as she dozed after sex.
• Geographic profiling. Levy could appear to be circling his lower Middlesex Street home, choosing women whose locations were convenient but on each occasion some distance from his most recent attack but, as he became more reckless and 'disorganised', closer and closer to that home?

But hey, we will never know, will we? For a start, Levy was married (albeit unhappily), and the FBI chaps say that 'disorganized' killers like Jack the Ripper are usually unmarried loners. No theory ever snuggly fits into the hole you have created for it.

As I used to walk from Aldgate East tube station to Fenchurch Street each dark autumn morning, passing the southern end of Middlesex Street, the old Hoop and Grapes pub, the run of shops that was once Butcher's Row, then St Botolph's mournful tower and the troubling space that is Mitre Square, it was a brisk, small, angry presence that I occasionally felt darting along beside me, and not a languid septuagenarian old Etonian in a top hat. Particularly one loquaciously reciting romantic poetry as he went, and with tickets to a Buckingham Palace garden party nestling in an inside pocket.

Latest List: 

The World's Most Prolific Serial Killers (no, they're not all American!)

Luis Garavito    Colombia
Pedro Lopez    Colombia
Daniel Camargo   Equador
Pedro Filho   Brazil
Yang Xlnhal   China
Andrei Chikatilo   Russia
Anatoly Onoprienko   Ukraine
Gary Ridgeway   USA
Alex Pichushkin   Russia
Ahmad Suradjl   Indonesia

Latest Essay:  Things Not to Do in Life

Latest List:  My Troublesome Words


LATEST ESSAY:

Things Not to Do in Life

Boys and girls, you really should consider not: 

Buying a house on a flood plain. Going to Harrods. Dating people who you work with. Preferring deep pan pizzas. Getting very tattooed. Betting on Newcastle to win the F.A Cup. Going for one promotion too far. Having a weekend in Blackpool. Wearing grey cotton in warm weather. Using your smart phone on the street in Newham. Paying for expensive gym membership in early January. 

Attending rock concerts in Hyde Park. Avoiding spending time with your parents. Expecting England to go beyond the quarter finals this time. Reading Harry Potter if you’re more than thirteen. Watching any Hollywood film released in the summer. Relying on black Lycra. Discussing immigration in a Dagenham pub. Believing your bum is too big….it never will be. Drinking red wine and strong lager in the same evening.  

Voting Tory because they’re better at the economy. Telling new friends that you are good at a sport until you have confirmation that they are not. Letting the waiter bully you into having bottled water. Letting the waiter keep pouring your wine. Driving in Essex. Exaggerating your salary. Contemplating a threesome. Camping in woodland in Scotland in the summer. Telling your boyfriend that a former relationship was no good because it was only about the sex. Putting travel off. 

Keeping goldfish. Wearing too much make-up. Wearing make-up every day. Wasting precious time on the Premiership. Expecting Australia to be as good as they say it is. Using the post office on Thursday morning. Watching any drama on ITV starting at 9 p.m. Failing to respond to any stranger suggesting you ‘cheer up’ by informing them that your sister has just been murdered in Detroit. Voting on X Factor but not voting in elections. Jogging any distance in boxer shorts. Not having as much sex as possible. 

Displaying your own photos as art. Getting a night bus when sober. Working somewhere because your friends do. Tasting wine you've ordered rather than just smelling it. Going to Robbie Williams concerts and doing his singing for him. Cooking vegetables without salt. Reading autobiographies of celebrities who are not yet at least fifty. Being over-familiar with the boss. Drinking weak coffee. Adding too much ketchup. Avoiding anchovies.  

Overestimating the warmth between female friends. Underestimating the warmth between male friends. Denying the allure of schadenfreude. Expecting empathy to last. Undervaluing your grandparents’ experiences. Dismissing live theatre. Wet shaving without hot water.

Living above a chicken shop. Gambling in Vegas. Neglecting foreign languages. Being too keen at the beginning of a relationship. Being too cool at the beginning of a relationship. Worrying too much about body hair. Always getting to the pub first. Cycling in London. Going for a curry on Brick Lane. Getting rid of old leather jackets. Hating Shakespeare.

Wearing denim with denim. Growing a goatee when overweight. Dismissing the benefits of flossing. Believing all Americans are like Texans. Investing in friends’ businesses. Visiting Slough. Hiring a car in Kenya. Buying frozen roast potatoes. Going to the cinema when people under 21 may also be there and expecting to listen to the film. Going for messed-up girls because they’re bound to be better in bed. Thinking you can change a bad boy because you’re special. Putting the chip pan on after coming home from the pub. Playing golf with people who have handicaps and swing coaches. Skiing with people who have skied since they were four.  

Flying Aeroflot on a foggy day. Agreeing to talk to Christ Scientists on Tottenham Court Road. Rushing a good lunch. Discussing ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ as literature. Choosing a north-facing balcony. Taking your socks off after your trousers in front of a beautiful woman. Grabbing a thistle when slipping over in a meadow. Showing off by eating all the lime pickle. Picking a fight in South Auckland. Wearing red trousers unless you’re an actor. Telling a New Yorker to get over 9/11. 

Saving for a rainy day. Thinking it can’t happen to you. Expecting something to turn up.

Failing to live all you can. 

William Ruby


LATEST LIST:     My Troublesome Words

             augur

             bouillabaisse

             Caesarean

             coliseum or Coloseum

             flammable or inflammable

             Neandertal

             pizzeria

             prophecy or prophesy

             restaurateur

             supersede

Latest Essay: The Pig

Latest List: Significant Persons Who Worked as Teachers

The Pig

Long ago the pig farmer’s job was a simple one: he fattened the pig and he sold it to market. He fed the pig, and he cared for the pig in all the ways he had been taught, and he watched it put on weight. He was left alone to feed the pig as he wished……he had done this same thing for a long time and knew a little something about what was required. He weighed it only when the time was right; he was trusted to get on with his job.

Asked, he would offer up the age-old wisdom: feed the pig, and it will grow.

But the farmer awoke one day to discover that much had changed.

He was told now that the pig should now have a target weight to aim for. This target weight would be based solely on what the pig had weighed as a piglet at its previous farm. In protesting that the weight suggested was far too heavy for the pig and therefore could never be reached, he was informed that the very process of aiming for a weight would be good for the pig in the long term. In suggesting that the pig may have been stressed by its journey to the new farm, or suffered disease as it grew, or escaped from its pen and not been available for its feed on many occasions, the farmer was warned to stop making weak excuses.

When the farmer asked what would happen when the pig inevitably failed to reach its target weight, he was told to work harder and stop avoiding blame for his skinny pig. The pig deserved better than he was giving it. If he was not careful, he could lose his job, or at least get no small pay rise each year like he used to for working so hard for so long at a job that few other people wanted to do.

Late one night, unable to sleep for worrying about all of this, the farmer crept down to the pig shed and did what he never imagined he would ever do: he tinkered with the weighing machine so that the pig would appear heavier in the morning. He was ashamed of his actions of course, but with a wife and small children to feed and bills to pay, the farmer felt he had no choice.

Time went by; life continued. New targets would come in and the farmer would make sure the pig made its weight. However, people started to notice that the pig was beginning to look a little thinner than it used to. The meat didn’t seem to them to be as good as it used to be either….not as tasty, or as lean, or as rich in fat as people preferred.

They were told that they were mistaken. The meat was as good as ever…in fact it was better.

Men came to the farm to inspect the farmer’s work. When the farmer…proud of his farm….tried to show the men all that he had achieved they were not interested; instead they stood watching him feeding the pig for a very small portion of time and then went away again. Before leaving one of the men walked towards him and stamped something on the farmer’s forehead. Alarmed, he rushed to the mirror and found that the stamp read: REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT. The farmer had changed only what these men had wanted him to change, and now they were telling him that his farm…his life’s work…was simply not good enough.

A letter arrived some days later. It read:

TO THE PIG FARMER WHO REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT

IMPROVEMENT REQUIRED:

STOP FEEDING THE PIG SO MUCH…..ALLOW PIG TO FEED ITSELF…..WEIGH PIG FAR MORE OFTEN……MAKE SURE PIG KNOWS HOW TO WEIGH ITSELF….

Later, he discovered that two of the three men who visited his farm not been pig farmers themselves for many, many years, and the third man had never been a pig farmer at all.

This is what the pig farm is like today:

The farmer has not had a pay rise for years. He is told that he may never get another. The small pot of money he was saving for his days after feeding the pig has been raided by men in suits in town who say he was being far too well treated in the first place. They are all in it together. The men’s suits seem to get nicer every time the farmer sees them.

Every few years, the same men in suits tell him to change the feed.

The farm is full of people who do not feed pigs. There is a person who checks that the pig is in its stall, for example; a person to assess the pig’s mental state; a person to reward the pig for putting on weight; a person to tell the farmer off for the pig not putting on weight, and to remind him that there are many other people out there who would like his job.

But the farmer is not so sure about that. He remembers when his job was a good one. He remembers when people used to tip their caps at him when he passed them on the street. Now it seems that he has fallen low in peoples’ eyes. The pig is a scrawny beast indeed, and the people must have somebody to blame.

And the pig?

Why, he was seen in his stall only yesterday. He was eating, as ever…when would he not be?...and rolling around in his own muck as nature has intended, but the more observant may have detected a strange look in his bright piggy eye. It is the look a skinny pig gets when it spies other pigs growing fat on new farms nearby. There is frustration there….at the lies it has been told and all the weighing that has been done to no great purpose because nobody seems to want the meat it has to offer, and there is definitely some envy.

It is an angry pig in fact, and it will escape from its pen very soon.

And we may be sorry.

William Ruby


Latest List:

Significant Persons Who Worked as Teachers

                      John Adams

               Robert Frost

               Lyndon B Johnson

               D H Lawrence

               Mussolini

               Thomas Paine

               Alexander Graham Bell

               Clara Barton

               George Orwell

Latest Essay: Actual Heights of Selected Notables

Latest List: Steve Horton's Commuting Gripes

Actual Heights of Selected Notables

There he was on the Tube platform at King's Cross, unmistakably himself: poised, well-dressed in that flamboyant actor manner, greying in a distinguished way at the temples, clearly self-possessed after a lifetime in the public eye, and indisputably, amazingly so in fact, SHORT. My God, what a shrimp: we're talking five-seven at the very best, probably five-six in fact! On screen and on the telly, well, you'd have always given him nearly six foot.

I believe we've probably all had a similar experience. Living in central London simply ratchets up the opportunities for spotting celebrities going about their business. I've occasionally spotted world stars (Liz Taylor in a wheelchair outside the Dorchester, Freddy Kruger actor Michael Englund on Carnaby Street, Lucy Lui shopping at Selfridge's) and less vaunted individuals just about every time I pop out for a few hours going anywhere. One can't move for the bleeders

And, boy, do they tend to have one thing in common, these famous folk. They're absolutely tiny. 

Lucy Lui was an insignificant dot of a person, seemingly so physically fragile and in need of cake that one could almost pity her all those Swiss bank account millions. Indeed I would one day like to pursue this correlation between success in the public realm and height deficiency, expecting to reveal some kind of demented publicity-addicted Napoleonic little man syndrome at work. We are told that extra height equates to greater lifetime earnings, more sexual partners, and higher social positions, yet this seems to break down completely among the glitterati.

In fact, there's more:

Beethoven (5 ft 3), Ghandi (5 ft 3), Khrushchev (5 ft 2), La Guardia (5 ft 0), Onassis (5ft 4),Marquis de Sade (5ft 3), Stalin (5ft 6), Hitler (5 ft 7), Picasso (5ft 4), Genghis Khan (4 ft 11),Alexander the Great (4 ft 11).........I could go on.

Imagine if you will Mayor La Guardia meeting Bill Clinton (6ft 2). We're talking cricked necks, giggles, cartoons.

If, like me, you're a solid average-to-tall 5 ft 10 and a bit and have stood next to a powerful men five inches shorter than you, the question inevitably arises: how on earth have these people managed to do it? You can't see them in a crowd, they have little hands, the top of their balding heads are always visible to most of the rest of us, it's lucky they've got plenty of cash because there's definitely nothing off the peg outside boys age 12 with an inside leg that small. Their will to succeed and determination to prevail must be off the chart, their talent all the more admirable.

And yet:

Lincoln (6ft 4), Howard Hughes (6ft 4), Lyndon Johnson (6 ft 3), Wyatt Earp (6ft 4), Mandela (6ft 2), De Gaulle (6ft 4), Bin Laden (6ft 4), Charlemagne (6ft 4), Idi Amin (6ft 4)

Imagine as well if you will, Wyatt Earp ever being played on screen by Kurt Russell (5 ft 8). Oh, he was. Shame.

And if, like me, you sometimes find it a little intimidating to stand next to a powerful men five inches taller than you, the question again arises: how on God's sweet earth did all of those other successful Munchkin guys manage it with all these giants blocking their way?

Somebody needs to do some research. For now, here is some of my own.

The average British man today is 5 ft 10 inches tall, the average Dutchman is 6ft, while the average Cambodian is just 5 ft 6. The world-wide variations are neither insignificant nor particularly surprising. China is a short nation, but is home to more 6ft plus individuals than the whole of Europe. The smallest man in the world is from mountainous Nepal (21.5 inches) and the tallest lives in mountainous Turkey (8 ft 1). American silver screen actor Alan Ladd was so short (5 ft 6) that his leading ladies walked beside him in trenches. Tom Cruise's height (5ft 8) is the most discussed in celebrity history. Most football fans will tell you that professional players regularly overestimate their heights by about two inches when reporting stats to Panini and the like (Michael Owen is down as 5ft 10: if you believe that, you'll believe anything). Conversely if human pond skater Peter Crouch is only 6ft 7 then I really am a Dutchman! Cary Grant was a tad over 6 foot but round shoulders took him below that mark and required the correctional assistance of a kind of girdle. Clint Eastwood was 6ft 4 in his Man with No Name pomp but comes in at a decidedly reduced and elderly 6 ft 1 these days. Hitler was the same height as Paris Hilton; put them together at a Berlin hotel bar in 1933 and the world might have been saved an awful lot of trouble. And anybody who has met the British Royal Family would encourage the view that they are doll-sized versions of the posh people regularly seen on TV.

Robert Pershing Wadlow, statistically the tallest man who ever lived at 8ft 11, was notoriously ineffectual with women despite obvious and unavoidable anatomical inferences, whereas Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (5ft 1) was known as the the 'teapot' by the girls in the brothel he inhabited for much of his life, so apparently blessed was he in the same respect.  

So maybe the height thing is a bit overstated.

And famous women? Freida Pinto's luminous screen beauty seemed sadly reduced when I encountered her in a restaurant in Islington and discovering that she was about the size of the average British eleven year-old. There are unexpectedly tall famous women beyond the obvious Uma Thurmans, Princess Dianas, Brigitte Nielsens, Sigourney Weavers, several supermodels and a few tennis players. Macy Gray is 6 foot for example, Carly Simon 5 ft 11 and Courtney Love 5ft 10. In heels, all these ladies would dwarf a chap like me (Alan Ladd need not even imagine such a thing).

And from history, the following remarkably tall women:....................................

That's right, there are none. Nothing. Not a single notable woman, from Cleopatra to Annie Oakley, has ever been described as tall, or being obviously taller than most. How curious.

However, if we were to list the ten most influential people in history, as proposed by Michael H. Hart in The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History to be: Muhammad, Newton, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Paul of Tarsus, Cài Lún, Gutenberg, Columbus and Einstein (no Darwin, Michael?) then we must draw a very clear conclusion. With the exception of the apparently tallish but hardly giant first century Palestinian Jesus of Nazareth, all of these towering cultural and scientific figures were by all reports corporeally rather average in height.

Maybe by avoiding the pitfalls that may come with either excessive or diminutive stature and the scrutiny of those others who would make an issue of such, they were they able to maximise the forces surging within them and go on to conquer their own worlds.

All ye of average height, rejoice!

William Ruby

Appendix: see www.celebheights.com if you want to find out which famous people share, or shared, your height. For me, these are: Robert Redford, John Lennon, Starsky, George Clooney, Rolf Harris and Mr T!


Latest List:

Steve Horton's Commuting Gripes

1. the "men" who have bags on wheels - for your summer jaunt to Benidorm: 
TICK; for your daily trip to the office: NO TICK
2. the tribe who crave hot food - cant you wait till you get home, stinker? 
3. the “cans” – they aren’t Dr Dre's; we’re hearing everything, idiot
4. the train walkers who congregate like sheep at the first set of doors in the first carriage

   as it reaches London  
5. the backpack/rucksack twat
6. the loudmouth mobile conversationalists – no filter, no class
7. last-minute barrier ticket-finder bollocks
8. impatient boarders……let us get off first, you cock monkey!
9. the family troop/part-time travellers…..how dare you get on my train?!
10.in fact the general public as a whole…lacking self-awareness, lacking deodorant, not giving up its seat to the elderly….you should be confined to your miserable suburban homes.

Latest Essay:  Done Good and Not So Good: TV Sports Punditry

Latest List : Most Over-Hyped British TV Things (2014 vintage)

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY:

Done Good and Not So Good: TV Sports Punditry

'Football's football. If that weren't the case it wouldn't be the game that it is'—
Garth Crooks

On 31 July 2012 Ian Thorpe, while working for the BBC on the London summer Olympics, spoke live on air without interruption for over two minutes on the subject of Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen's sudden controversial excellence. His tone was measured, his assertions were supported by both personal professional and anecdotal evidence, he told us things that most of us probably hadn't thought about, he posed apposite intriguing questions, he gently scolded us for our strangely persistent xenophobia. It was TV sports punditry at its very best.

Two months earlier, on the opening night of the 2012 European football Championships in Poland and the Ukraine, BBC's Robbie Savage was asked to comment on the chances of one particular nation doing well, and replied with giggles that he had forgotten which country he had just been asked about.

There is simply too great a range of TV sports punditry, moreover too little that is very good, and far too much that is trash. At one end, Thorpe: bright, insightful, challenging, witty, warm, on our boxes because he is the second greatest swimmer in history, and prepared to share an almost unique knowledge base with us without recourse to posing. At the other, Savage: a yapping monosyllabic Chauncey Gardner, on our boxes (on a wedge) because his playing career featured hounding, snarling, hair, japes.

So what is great TV sports punditry? Accomplishment would seem to be in the eye of the beholder. There are those who would hold up Savage's keenness to dismiss as forthrightness, and Thorpe has been accused of not only hiding a certain pomposity from the uninitiated under a skein of extreme civility but damaging Britain's relationship with the Antipodes through his repeated use of the sometimes condescending Aussi 'Look' to open sentences in which there will be opinion.

And yet there would seem to be a basic pot of qualities from which the great pundit should be able to draw easily and repeatedly. Vis-à-vis: infectious enthusiasm for the exceptional, technical insight beyond the common and garden, an ability to criticise constructively, and to pose questions that the viewer should ponder but struggle to find easy answers to. Add to this vim, occasional humour, some wrath when required, and a way with words (even given for example British association footballers' usual limitations) that is semantically sound and as free of epigrammatic forms and tired cliché as is reasonable to expect.

At no time should a pundit resort to the following words unless overcome by very rare moments of brilliance and drama, or indeed drink: 'unbelievable', 'literally', 'absolutely' (to mean 'yes'), 'awesome'. No sentence should begin with the words 'I mean'. Adverbs must not be adjectives! Sportsmen and women do not leave skills in their locker. We know he will not be happy with that glaring technical error—he's a professional on 200K a week! The crowd is never the extra man.

Here's a list of the great and good of contemporary TV sports punditry: Ian Thorpe, Michael Johnson, John McEnroe, Luca Vialli (part-time and maybe all the better for it), Brian Moore, Gary Neville, Stuart Barnes. It is a small list, an elite list.

And now, the reasonable: Alan Hansen, Roy Keane (better all the time), Gordon Strachan, Mark Lawrenson, Colin Jackson, Boris Becker, Jonathan Davies, Keith Wood, Graeme Souness, Graham Taylor, Tracy Austin, Danny Murphy (the coming power). They do no harm, there are plenty of them (many more not listed here), they played the game themselves for many years, they know more than we do, they are collectively that cliché the 'safe pair of hands'.

Finally, the incompetent: Jamie Redknapp, Mark Bright, Garth Crooks, Alan Shearer, Andy Townsend, Denise Lewis, Greg Rusedski (et al). They should not be paid, heard or seen, unless it is to provide the contrast we require with the elite group. They coined it in as athletes and are coining it in again as progenitors of broadcast dross. They should know more than us, but it often seems that they do not.

You should notice several things about these lists. There is far too much football for a start. My apologies; it dominates my viewing, it dominates our viewing. Thorpe has appeared for just one glorious summer, whereas Hansen has been sitting on that MOTD sofa for twenty years, with his Captain Scarlet looks, and his scar, and his grit and his determination, so big mismatches of that type are inherent. Certain TV sports are ignored (cricket, horse racing, rugby league, snooker, boxing) because I simply do not watch them (in the case of boxing, I do not watch it any longer). The golf commentators in particular has become a weird hybrid: part technical adviser, part amateur botanist, part apologist for the failings of the pros they clearly know personally, and rather too well to be entirely dispassionate about (okay, Wayne Grady is the best of them, if you must).

 And so on.

 Let us take the elite group first and dissect the anatomy of their brilliance.

Thorpe we have dealt with. Johnson distils gravitas and a deep commitment to the highest competitive standards in Morgan Freeman tones. His emotional intelligence is not high, so the analytical honesty is all the more pronounced. McEnroe continues to baffle; is he really the oafish daddy's boy of that long-ago time? A seemingly endless desire to tease and question pours from him. He is the enemy of cant and obviousness. Moore's Exasperation should be bottled and labelled as such, then sold as an elixir to cure common ills: blandness, reliance on platitudes, too much deference to underperforming players, coaches and officials. His crabby relationship with Eddie Butler is a joy.

Barnes has reigned supreme for several years now as the tactical analyst who tells it as it is. Many rugby followers do not like him, but there is no sport with more opinion than that of the oval ball, tanked up as it is with eight pints of Guinness and a Redbrick university assertiveness. Neville is the new boy on the block. Ignore the bluebottle Greater Manc drone if you can, and focus on the pith. One gets the impression that this man will record every single one of his televised appearances, and then punish himself with punches to the head for any utterance that does not take the viewer forward in his understanding of the movement and intentions of twenty-two men all together on a big green playing surface.

And Vialli, the sublime Vialli, seen so rarely. His performances during both the Italy-England and Italy-Germany matches at the 2012 Euros were pundit heaven, pundit perfection, so much so in the latter game that the always excellent Klinnsman (notwithstanding Germany's dire performance) appeared to be struck dumb in comparison. Vialli conveyed good sense, an understanding of tactical nuance, kindness (yes, kindness; Johnson, Moore and Neville would drown in two millimetres of the stuff), great enthusiasm and, ultimately, perspective in flawless English, managing to commiserate with his English and German co-presenters and pundits in a way that allowed them all to grieve their losses but still consider that positives existed. But I suppose that's what a very expensive Italian education gets you, plus the family millions.

And now those others. I will lump them together in one giant, amorphous, nightmarish paragraph.

Jamie Redknapp: so many reasons to ask 'why?' Why a pundit in the first place (he was about 23 when he did his first slot, a baby, distracting himself from a playing career already punctuated with injury); why still apparently a pundit who is there for females to look at when most of them cannot have failed to imagine he will turn into his twitching spiv father, indeed can already see the signs; why allowed to sit beside the sublime Neville and the sound Souness to pundit; why not advised years ago to stop using the asinine double adjective 'top, top' (top, top player, top, top goal, top, top game, top, top reason to smash the TV screen in); why still after so much practice singularly unable to disguise the way he checks out his co-pundits' opinions before offering abridged version of them? Mark Bright is just thick. And closes his eyes to speak. And stammers over about 45% of his words. And employs the worst kind of already-out-of-date neologums like 'they were playing lastminute.com there, Mike.' Dreadful. There is a pompous ball of a man in football punditry; he detects profundity in the mundane, clearly believes his longevity in role has bestowed gravitas upon him, and has perhaps the most cushy job in England (hence the fat). He is Garth Crooks. If you want to know why Alan Shearer is so bad, do two things: Google 'Shearer' and 'Ben Arfa', then replay in your mind that series of weird irrelevant grins he deployed in his pitch-side interview with Jake Humphreys before an England game at the 2012 Euros. You will have all the evidence you need. Andy Townsend: can you remember anything he has ever said? The nation's men are grateful to Denise Lewis for her lovely derriere, displayed to great effect when she bounced up and down on that chair when Mo Farrah won the 10, 000 metres at the London Olympics. Michael Johnson clearly despises her every opinion, running contrary as they do to his exactitude and his superior learning. And so we condemn her too. The voice is also difficult to deal with: squeaky, not black enough. 

Finally there is Greg Rusedski, the worst pundit of all time. He is the worst not because his opinions and insights differed so much from McEnroe and Henman and the others at SW11, but rather because of his schoolboy over-eagerness, and the way he wanted so obviously to be all controversial and funny like big Mac but then couldn't manage it, and the ridiculous Canadian college boy delivery that he should have softened years before in trying to convince us he was British, and because he is just one recently stopped playing the game, I'll get me a nice bit of easy cash talking shit about the game because most of the mug punters at home haven't got a fucking clue anyhow too many.

And truly, that remains the problem with TV sports punditry: too much from within, not enough from without. The health of any species relies on reproductive diversity, and well-informed members of the audience—journalists, bloggers, fans, people who have spent their lives investing in their sports, loving their sports, poring over their sports, developing opinions and ideas about their sports that are vibrant and alternative for the very reason that they are standing at a distance--are almost entirely excluded from the process

William Ruby


LATEST LIST: Most Over-Hyped British TV Things (2014 Vintage)

                

                 Stephen Fry Polymath (permanent member)

                 Sherlock

                 Doctor Who

                 Poverty Porn 

                 Food shows (permanent member)

                 Miranda Hart

                 Benedict Cumberbatch

                 Idris Elba

                 BBC sports trailers (Winter Olympics, Six Nations Rugby)

                 Poor copies of Scandinavian noir crime shows