Category Archives: Such is life

Kingsley Amis at Princeton, New Jersey, May 1959

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Come into the garden, Maude,


you faithless American faculty wife.


Strife? Christ, girl, there’ll be no strife.

Your husband, Linguistics Professor Claude,

saw your foot tease my cock to life


under the table, which he ignored.

No wonder you yank girls are bored:

I’d have gone for someone like me with a knife.

Ciggie? Well, you’re a sport. Our time just flew.


Now go back to the dinner, don’t get all soppy,

and send me out another wife or two.

Come on, love, no need to get stroppy,

you’ve got super tits and you’ll make great copy;

Sure I’ll put you in a book, or a girl just like you.

Work: and cabinets/cabinettes

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Sorry, I’m working, and that’s going to have to be the priority. The tawse story gets interesting, since it has sex, sound effects and reflections on how reality isn’t much like pornotopia, but it’s more fun to live in.

Cabin boy, or possibly cabinette. Let's call her ... Roger.

Anyway, watch this space. We’ll get under way, or weigh, later. I think under weigh was the original form, and had to do with weighing anchor before you can set sail; but the only thing I know about sailing ships is that if I were a ship’s captain in pornotopia, I’d be birching the cabin boy for, oh, stealing rum, when, after some especially frantic wriggling on the culpit’s part it turned out that the boy was a girl stowaway, who … (continued page 197 of the web)

Back to work, though, for me. I’ll get back to my story when I can come up for air. 

Not the tawse’s tale: Talking about the weather

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It’s late at night. There have been storms. A pine tree outside my back window was struck by lightning. It’s a big tree, a high as a four or five story building. I want to build a tree house towards the top, and use it to observe comet showers. The lightning hit about two thirds of the way up the tree, and big, thick, hard scars of bark exploded in all directions: in the pool, all over the lawn, onto the balcony where I have breakfast when it’s warm enough.

The tree caught alight, with great yellow-red gouts of flame, but fortunately it was raining so hard that it soon put the fire out. But you could smell it smouldering for a day or two. 

I’d dealt with that, and then on Wednesday night there was a wind storm. The gale howled as if someone was trying to push the Arctic through power pylons: that humming of wire and shrilling of air, the coldest sound on earth. I fell deeply asleep, since it’s good to be warm when that is happening. But in the morning, a huge oak had split in half, and the half that fell had landed, spectacularly, in the swimming pool, breaking the pool cover I’d made. It must have been extraordinarily loud, but I didn’t hear a thing. 

Today I finished the job of turning the fallen tree into pieces that will fit in the living room fireplace. Which is good, because just after I finished, and moved on to cutting up some other logs, the chain on my chainsaw twisted, and it’s now kinked out of shape. I’ll have to try to fix it, taking out a couple of links while I’m about it.

Anyway, I was going to continue the story of the tawse. But it’ll have to start tomorrow. It’s bedtime.

Jeremy Bentham’s weirdness #2

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Probably the oddest thing about Jeremy Bentham is that he’s still around, and he attends meetings of the Board of University College, London.

Bentham. That's a wax head on his shoulders, and his real head in a jar at his feet. Don't ask.

When he died on 6 June 1832, he left his entire estate to the University College London. There was just one condition, that they had to enbalm his body, and his body would be brought to the table, to attend every college board meeting.

So his body sits in a wheelchair, most of the time, in a cabinet at the college. But he does attend the meetings. He’s listed on the minutes as “present but not voting.”

Bentham lived alone for a long time, so he managed to get fairly eccentric. I don’t think he believed in life after death, so I don’t think he thought that he’d personally be interested in the meetings. He may have thought that his physical presence would inspire the board members to remember his bequest and be sure to apply his philosophical principles in governing the college.

Or … maybe he just had one of those nineteenth century senses of humour, that seem a little robust by our standards. A friend of mine was at University College, though not on the board, and he says that Bentham’s seemed to be a benign and vaguely comforting presence. 

The next post won’t be about Bentham, hey?

Male doms and submissive women

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I don’t think I’ve ever had a submissive partner, either in play or in a long term relationship, who wasn’t a feminist.

People mostly thought Andrea Dworkin was a joke, but she was a tragedy. She mostly harmed her own side.

Not all of the submissive or surrendered women I’ve known would use the word, but that’s mainly because of the images it can conjure up.

That image combined obesity, sexless puritanism, righteousness, angry insanity, Berthold Brecht’s haircut (Tiny Tim’s, in Andrea Dworkin’s case), and general authoritarianism. It’s a dated image, but it does linger on. A lot of women would rather be in a club that has Rihanna in it than one that had Andrea Dworkin in it. Well, I support feminism, but me too, on that. 

But one of my earliest submissive girlfriends was the Director of Women’s Issues for a trade union, so she wasn’t just feminist; she got paid for it. I remember her on her feet at a public rally, during a campaign to lift pay rates in industries that employ a lot of women. She made an absolutely brilliant speech, passionate, firebrand stuff. A lot of unionists, career feminists and politicians were looking at and noting the newcomer, wondering how they could get her into this alliance or that. I was sitting quietly in the background, incredibly proud that she was mine.

What no-one noticed was the little intake of breath when she sat down again. There were women on the panel who didn’t really approve of her having sex with men. So it’s lucky they didn’t know that she’d made that speech with her arse still burning, and one dozen fresh cane stripes across it. I’d cut the bamboo only that morning.

Rihanna bites the whip. Pink everywhere. Vaguely comic, but definitely not tragic.

Of course, as well as my proper and very real pride in her I felt also proud for pathetic and unworthy reasons: I’d just canedandfucked this much admired feminist activist, so I must be no end of a mensch. I’ll admit that stupid thought here: no-one’s reading this blog anyway.

But that didn’t make me less supportive, or her politics one atom less feminist, or her speech less effective. It added a little energy, if anything. But if they’d known about it, those other women on that panel, they’d have turned on her and tried to get her thrown off. 

[More to say, but tomorrow.]