A LOT OF BOTTLE

TO LIVERPOOL AGAIN THIS WEEKEND, hopefully to witness at close quarters the end of the trial for affray of Steven “Stevie G” Gerrard, MBE, professional footballer extraordinaire for Liverpool FC, wannabe Disc Jockey and famous nightclub brawler. Much ado is being made about the trial in Liverpool, centring, in the main, on the horror expressed by so many fans of Liverpool Football Club (and indeed others) that such a “decent lad” as Steven can be even imagined to be a thug.

IT IS NEVER FAIR TO PREJUDGE individuals, as being from Liverpool myself I know how injurious this can be; the mere noting of a heavy fricative in one’s voice can get one barred from the more exclusive dining rooms, clubs, bars and (so I am told) brothels. Thus, at trial, jury members were asked whether they “had an interest” in the outcome of the hearing. This is presumably to discover whether any of them were Everton fans, like Gerrard himself.

GERRARD HAS CLAIMED HE HAD “no intention of having a fight”, but that he believed his accuser, Marcus McGee, “was about to smack him” and so “I punched him on the side of his head (…) and then hit out at him maybe three times, but (…) got him only once.” This is clearly self-defence in Liverpool, although juridical concordance with it may lead to a healthy number of defendants opting for this plea. “I thought he had a knife, so I stabbed him in self defence”, “a machine gun…”, “weapons of mass-destruction…”, “a nuclear bomb…” and so on.

CCTV FOOTAGE, HOWEVER GERRARD pleads, will have the last word. I am not sure that Gerrard understood the question asked of him yesterday: whether he was “sickened” by what he saw when the CCTV footage of him drinking in the bar was shown. Gerrard thought it referred to the affray, of which Gerrard will no doubt be acquitted, but I believed it referred to seeing a decent, supposedly civilised man drinking beer out of a bottle. Sickening indeed.

THE NORWICH DISUNION

CURIOSITY IS RIFE, ONE IMAGINES, about what will happen at today’s by-election in Norwich North, brought about by the resignation of Ian Gibson ex-MP, caught up in the ridiculous smearing of MPs for minor offences involving legitimately fiddled expenses. Gibson was found guilty of nothing more than using government tax exemption and parliamentary privilege in order to pay for a house and then “sell” it on to his daughter at what the Daily Telegraph called a “knock-down price”.

THIS DISTRESSING SITUATION has led to belief in a public backlash against decent, bona fide politicians, and therefore the list of riff-raff hoping to steal a seat from the hands of their rightful superiors is greater than usual in these lamentable by-election affairs. Many people feel it would be much more sensible to replace an MP in the “European way”, in which the leader of the party simply nominates one of his friends, his wife or his mistress to replace the outgoing parliamentarian. Yet this would not be cricket in Britain, others think.

THUS, ALONG WITH LABOUR’S HAPLESS, swine-flu-stricken Chris Ostrowski, a graduate of the University of East Anglia, and thus destined for a dull, grey life in the back office of an insurance company, we also have pouting, fresh-faced Chloe Smith, the likely winner, and the absurdly-named April Pond (Liberal), who by the sounds of things should be standing for the Green Party, or the “Save the Ducks Party”. Pond is also a possibility.

BUT MY HEART GOES OUT to Howling Laud Hope (right, above), the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Ever since the glory days of the party’s first candidates, Screaming Lord Sutch and Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel, the OMRLP has been my choice when called upon to make my mark on democracy (which unfortunately I never seem to get round to doing). Regrettably, the proliferation of absurd candidates at this election will no doubt damage the chances that Hope (“Don’t be a Dope, Vote for Hope”) has of sneaking into a respectable third place. But we shall see this evening.

BUSH SURVIVORS

TRADITIONALLY, SUMMER PRESENTS many and varied problems for our journalists: hardly any of them feel comfortable in swimming trunks, and even fewer are easy on the eye when semi-naked, yet this, of course, can be dealt with by staying in London, where most decent people wear clothes, if only for protection against our weather. But the silly-season difficulties arise due to the fact that the people who “make the news”, as our journalists term it, flock off to warmer shores.

THUS THE BARREL NEEDS A GOOD SCRAPING to get an interesting story, given that the Michael Jackson issue seems to have petered out long before its expected shelf-life suggested, the parliament has gone on holiday and cancelled the milk for the time being, football transfers seem to have been damaged by the new tax laws and the cricket is as dishwater dull as it is every year.

THEREFORE WE HAVE TO TURN TO ABSURD issues such as that of Jamie Neale, and his “miraculous” surviving of a “twelve day ordeal” in the Australian bush. In clear evidence that junior reporters are dealing with the odd pages in most of our standard newspapers while the big boys are away, the press have taken remarkably different tacks on the story: on the one hand there are the suspicious writers who suggest that going off into the bush with a bread roll, a bottle of water, no mobile phone and apparently no brains was either a confidence trick or the act of a dope; on the other are those who compare his survival to the achievements of Amundsen, Scott, Hilary and Aldrin.

NEALE ENDED UP BEING FOUND in the car park of the Woollaa-Woollaa Ramma-Damma-Billabong Holiday Inn in Hubble-Bubble District, I seem to remember, although perhaps someone should check these names, none the worse for wear. Twelve days surviving the bush without as much as an iPod is going some for a teenager nowadays. But he will be the better for it; so many adults had to do this for eight years, and so, in a way, we are all Bush survivors.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

TRUE TO FORM, OUR GOVERNMENT and, particularly, its opposition are showing great interest in the Afghanistan issue now that someone from the higher social strata has become a victim of this idiotic escapade. Many members of the Welsh Guards have been killed in different conflicts over the years, but one might imagine that the government would let the entire population of Wales die before it decided to spend any money on providing troops with adequate protection. Yet when Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, was killed in action, our leaders were moved as one to bring about a public enquiry into how our troops are looked after, and now getting more helicopters and “boots on the ground” has become a project.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, the fact that Cherie Blair has been forced to cancel her barbecue and honoris causa engagements in Liverpool after catching swine flu will most likely lead to the absurdly-named “Tamiflu” medication flowing freely over the counters in the next few weeks as yet another “priority project”. The news that 40,000 people complained to their doctor of “flu-like-illness” last week merits a footnote in the average newspaper, but the report about Mrs Blair gets in the region of a quarter of an inside page in many of them.

I AM SURE THAT CHERIE will be perfectly safe from this swine sickness, as she has always looked extremely well when I have bumped into her. Physically at least, she often seems a picture of health, except in pictures themselves, although she sounds a bit dotty and will not be healthy forever if she insists on opening the front door in her night dress. Whether or not she becomes seriously ill is of extreme importance; government policy, and thus the fate of a goodly number of people, depends on it.

LIGHT MY FIRE

I KNOW THAT IT WOULD BE UNTRUE to suggest that all of the leaders of the soi-disant G8 nations, accompanied by their token developing-nation chums the G5, are a bunch of hypocrites, but I have a tendency to suspect that their recently-found zeal over global warming is nothing more than a smoke screen in front of the fire in which they have their own political irons white hot.

“THE TIME TO HESITATE IS OVER”, stated Gordon Brown and Barack Obama yesterday in unison, in an almost direct quotation from Robby Krieger’s The Doors song, “now we must act on reducing carbon emissions.” This, of course, is all well and good on paper, but France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the USA and particularly China and India, six of the 8 and 2 of the 5, have doubled their production of private cars over the last five years, and when one considers that the population of these eight nations is close to three-quarters of the G13 population then these words ring less than honest.

“IF THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is,” Blake tells us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, yet, alas, they are not cleansed to the eyes and ears of the increasing majority of people who really believe that an increase in temperature of two degrees centigrade would plunge us into the fires of hell and also truly accept that our leaders believe this and are doing something about it.

THE REAL TRUTH OF THE MATTER is that talking about global warming billows smoke into the eyes of those who would otherwise see among the G13 leaders massive financial mismanagement, corruption on a scale that beggars belief, government investment in ludicrous armament plans, personal lack of decency, self-serving attitudes with our money, huge disinvestment in health and education, and political and social repression. While these issues are kept on a back burner, then it is our personal well-being and happiness that can become a funeral pyre, not the planet.

DON’T LOOK NOW

I HAPPENED TO BE READING MY SECONDARY SCHOOL REPORTS earlier today, and, to my surprise, now nearly forty years later, I discovered that, after Mathematics, which was by far my best subject at school, I consistently received marks of over 90% in Geography, this despite the teacher being unable to stimulate a prostitute’s interest in a wad of fifty-pound notes.

DESPITE SUCH EARLY PROWESS, I must say that I had never heard of the city of Urumqi before, and, frankly, neither had you. And so the news that thousands of Han Chinese have been roaming the streets of Urumqi, according to The Times, including “ men and women of all ages, girls in high heels and young men in smart white shirts”, with “billiard cues, iron bars and even machetes as they surged towards the main city bazaar” was a tad surprising.

HAVING NOW SEEN URUMQI ON A MAP, I am even further amazed to discover that they play billiards there. On the other hand, even though I trust anyone who writes for The Times implicitly, I would like to know how a journalist watching from the fourth floor balcony of a hotel can distinguish between a billiard cue, a pool cue and a snooker cue. No doubt someone will send me this information in due course.

MICHAEL JACKSON’S FUNERAL is obviously to blame for this turn of events in a province of China which seems not to have been up to anything over the last few hundred dynasties, but where a little bit of repression and aggression can go unnoticed while we all watch haggard Diana Ross, decrepit “Little” Stevie Wonder, clapped-out Lionel Richie and bloated Mariah Carey sing their tributes to the “greatest entertainer who ever lived.”

ROCK WITH ME

THE PALAVER AROUND ‘CLOSURE’ for the ‘world’ after the death of Michael Jackson is a social imperative. Many weeping, limp, insecure, halt, distraught and socially inadequate people need to know that he is at rest. Otherwise they will be blocking up much-needed psychiatric wards around the southern states of the USA for years, like Elvis fans still do.

THE FOLK WHO FOLLOWED Michael have shown their depth of feeling in no uncertain terms unless one looks at the dialectics of their verbal issue. But we get there. One local politician, from, I believe, Gary, Indiana, licked the stamp on the matter for me: “Michael’s death is like your Kennedy being shot”, a simile reiterated by a small number of television interviewees. (The your is mine.)

I SUPPOSE THIS REFERS to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, although I have no idea where the comparison may lie in the mind of these humble speakers talking in their underwear on the lawns in front of their caravans. When presidents and/or heads of states get shot to death, other presidents and/or leaders either get worried or become presidents and/or leaders.

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA might thus have wanted to have a word upon this “so relevant” death. After all, the similarities between Obama and Jackson are so great: the first true “crossover” black/mainstream artists; an ability to “hold a crowd on a whisper”; "mesmerising presence on stage”; coming from a “lowly steel town”; ability to kill a fly at five feet; among others. But Obama has not shown his hand, preferring to send a letter to the family in private and call Jackson’s death “tragic”.

OUR OWN GORDON BROWN has done his best. Understanding that he shouldn’t get involved in this matter at least until he finds out what an iPod is, he simply stated that he felt “deeply sorry for Michael Jackson’s family upon his death.” Is it only me, or do I get the feeling that Gordon Brown probably felt sorry for Michael Jackson’s family when Jackson was alive?

ANYONE FOR TENNIS?

AFTER YEARS OF WORSHIPPING someone who spoke with a decent public school accent, had a sensible haircut and never seemed to get ruffled – indeed, three of the qualities one expects from an English gentleman – the Wimbledon public are now making an attempt to try to maintain a liking for a dour, ill-tempered and erratic Scot, all under the guise of English people doing their best to pretend that they are “British”, an epithet usually left for the hordes of unkempt Celts that occupy the West of the islands, and descendents of Europeans and other sundry immigrants to our shores.

TIM HENMAN was someone the English tennis-loving community could rely on. He would on occasion get to a semi-final of Wimbledon and threaten to do better, but one instinctively knew that he would get no further, as winning international sports events just was not English. This solid English dependability was what made him so loved.

NOW ABSENT HEROES HAVE BECOME FORGOTTEN through the fiery presence of Andy Murray, a Scot who knows he is a Scot, and behaves like a Scot. Henman, as all English gentlemen should do on retirement, has disappeared into utter oblivion. Murray however, is still clinging to the possibility that he will go “all the way”, even though so many of us know that – just as has happened so many times in the past – his success will be short-lived. Indeed, I imagine that he will be eliminated, and perhaps humiliated, before long -- if he doesn’t sensibly withdraw from the competition when things get tough, as he has done before. One wonders whether Gordon Brown will take the hint.