Dawn, 25th April

The Pert Young Piece won’t be around Redfellow Hovel this week. She’s temporarily flown the coop.

As of now she should be meeting up with a party of dubious antipodeans in Istanbul and environs.

On Tuesday night the party camps out near North Beach at Anzac Cove, ready for the annual dawn service of remembrance.

It’s not just because she’s a history buff. It’s not just for the dubious pleasure of being with Australians and similar low-lifes. Or even the inevitable consumption of Efes Pilsener. It’s because Great-great-uncle Nevil was there before her.

So she’s carrying, and may suitably deposit, a small acknowledgement:

______________________________________________________________________________________

Remembering

94874 Bombardier Nevil Pigot and his comrades of B Battery, 68th Brigade, RFA

Deepcut Barracks, 1915

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Bombardier Nevil Pigot, B. By., 68th Bde, RFA, received the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) in the London Gazette of 21 June 1916 for conspicuous gallantry when repeatedly repairing telephone wires under continuous shrapnel fire.

Bombardier Nevil Pigot, B. By., 68th Bde, RFA, received the Serbian Cross of Karageorge, 2nd Class, with Swords, in the London Gazette of 21 April 1917.

Bombardier Nevil Pigot, RFA, mentioned in despatches in the London Gazette of 13 July 1916 for distinguished and gallant services rendered during the period of General Sir Charles Monro’s Command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

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Also the elder brother of Nevil Pigot

 125573 Gunner Edward Wilson Pigot, Royal Garrison Artillery

Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension N°2 (Somme, France)

Deep-rooted prejudice in Muswell Hill

Malcolm has just spent half-an-hour with a putty knife, committing herbicide.

The victims were Taraxacum official, the common and — in this case — garden dandelion.

So why is it that the daisies in Malcolm’s lawn get away with it, but the dandelions are persecuted ruthlessly? After all, dandelion could appear in your salad: the plant allegedly has medicinal properties. The daisy, by contrast, is merely a parasite.

Yet it has the Good Chaucerian Seal of Approval:

… when that the month of May
Is comen, and I hear the fowles sing,
And that the flowers ginnen for to spring,
Farewell my book and my devotion!
Now have I then such a condition,
That, above all the flowers in the mead,
Then love I most these flowers white and red,
Such that men calle Day’s-eyes in our town;
To them have I so great affectioun,
As I said erst, when comen is the May,
That in my bed there dawneth me no day
That I n’am up, and walking in the mead,
To see this flow’r against the sunne spread,
When it upriseth early by the morrow …

Let you into an open secret, Geoff: it’s called “daisy” in pretty well every town.

Chaucer thereupon thunders into an extensive analogy, which Sheila Delany expounded into a vehicle for positions on sex, gender, religion, politics, history, interpretation, and writing. In these degenerate latter days literature is hag-ridden (nice bit of gynophobia there, Malcolm) by lit-critting socio-linguists: writer beware! Be sure your Freudian sub-text will find thee out.

Compared to the modest, chaste daisy, the dandelion is so boisterous, blowsy, and advertises itself so blatantly. It needed a James Russell Lowell, in the mid-19th century, to celebrate this noxious polluter of Malcolm’s lawn:

Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold,
High-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they
An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round
May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.

Harmless? Not in Malcolm’s eyes. So he takes the putty-knife to the root of the matter.

It is, of course, a fruitless and frustrating task. Two days on, and they’ll be back.

Boris not-good-enough

It began with a thread on Slugger O’Toole, where Northern Ireland shows the world how to blog.

Despite the best efforts of a couple of committed enthusiasts, because the London Mayoral election doesn’t involve vast residues of sectarian prejudice, and despite a nice introductory piece by Turgon-the-Wise, it hasn’t been a particularly busy exchange of views.

So much so that one commenter described it as Malcolm Redfellow’s numerous monologues.

It was late on Saturday night, Sunday morning. Malcolm had spent some post-prandial quality time with his professorial little brother and Charlie Wells’s Bombardier in the Famous Royal Oak. That might have some moment in what ensued.

Malcolm became quite baleful, and the outpouring went like this:

I’m fairly close to the action here in Norf Lunnun. I’ve actively been electorally involved in out-going and in-coming ordure (originally in Dublin, now over here) since the 1960s. I am thinking I have never seen anything like the orchestrated media campaign that has been waged against Livingstone.

We need to bear in mind that BoJo is, to all intents and purposes, currently the creature of the corporate lobbyists CTF Partners, a pseudopod of Crosby|Textor (don’t forget the vertical bar).

¶ C = Lynton Crosby, the Australian analogue of Dubya’s Karl Gove, and regularly employed as the Tory “dark arts” operator;
¶ T = Mark Textor, an Australian pollster;
¶ F = Mark Fullbrook, a political slime ball from the darkest recesses of Tory Central.

My present guess is that the Mayorality will run quite close, especially when the second preferences engage. If BoJo wins, it will be a grotesque manipulation, through hysterics, of the electoral process: who would have thought that Boris “picaninnies” Johnson could smear anyone on race and religion?

Remember, too, that Johnson was sacked from the Tory front bench for being outed as a blatant liar. Let us cherish Tory leader Michael Howard’s great definition of Tory morality: Howard said the sacking was because Johnson had lied over a messy affair with Petronella Wyatt. It had nothing to do with morality.

So, you can get offed by the Tory machine.

• Not for agreeing that a journo who had annoyed BoJo’s criminal best man, Darius Guppy, should now be done over with a dose of GBH.
• Not for hiding a quarter-million of campaign donations.
• Not for exploiting the assassination of Ken Begley to impugn the people of Liverpool.
• Not for impregnating Petsy Wyatt, promising (bigamously?) to marry her, persuading her to at least one abortion, and then dumping her (BoJo’s alleged chat-up line “I limit myself to one mistress per annum. How would you like to be Miss 2009?”).

No: for peddling porkies.

And London may fall for it, again.

And that, folks,amounts to an Irish joke: one an Englishman laughs at.

Malcolm stands by that: much of which has been previously rehearsed here.

Milder, but only by a degree, is Sonia Purnell of the Independent stable, but — perhaps more significantly — author of the unauthorised biog. of BoJo:

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is notoriously difficult for Londoners to get close to. He is the most highly protected and stage-managed politician in Britain, and his minders allow access to only the most reliably sympathetic or adulatory journalists. As the author of an unauthorised biography, Just Boris, it was therefore with some concern that I set off, unannounced, to join him on the campaign trail in Romford, east London, yesterday. It was only with what I felt to be pretty gritty determination – and the presence of a reassuringly burly photographer – that I managed to sidle up to him at all. His minders are known for their ferocious handling of dissenters, and I was apprehensive of being “dealt with” myself.

“Dealt with” is an uncomfortable echo of that telephone call between fraudster, Darius Guppy, and rising hack, Boris Johnson. The full horror of that was a topic  for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme in 2009. Get the actualité here.

Of course, all this makes Malcolm another Livingstone dupe, doesn’t it?

Err … no.

Malcolm is torn between using his vote in the only effective way to stop BoJo (and, yes, that means a second preference for Livingstone) and supporting who seems the really principled and sanest candidate here (and that means a first preference for Siobhan Benita).