The Impotence Of Being Honest

Thought For The Day

Poo-tee-weet.

Inspector Morose

Inspector Morse – the World’s First Contemporary-set Costume Drama.  Is it my imagination, or did pretty much every Morse episode basically involve the following?

"Shut up Lewis, you’re from Liverpool and don’t understand about clever things, like musical snobbery."

"That’s right sir, I’m just a poor scouser, but can I point out something completely obvious so that you can look pained and then realise I’ve got a point, in my simple working class way?"

"If you must Lewis, but I have a large collection of old recordings of Maria Callas going la la la in French, singing about cigarette factories and traditional Spanish cruelty to animals, so naturally I’m not going to listen."

"But surely sir, the murderer is the famous guest actor with a role in the story inversely proportional to their position on the cast list?"

"Shut up Lewis.  Oh, hello Inspector Strange.  I’m a detective with a 100% clear-up rate (better than Sherlock Holmes, in fact) and yet you’re still always grumpy with me, and behave like I’m an amateur in need of your advice.  And that name’s a bit dodgy, this isn’t a Dickens novel you know."

“You’re Getting Too Involved Morse” (copyrighted phrase)

"Don’t I always.  After all, I’ve just met an attractive middle-aged woman that I’m going to make a slightly charmless and old-fashioned move on, without realizing that naturally this means she will either be a murderer, or be murdered, within the next 35 minutes, or just tell me to clear off for being such an abrasive old meany.  Fortunately Oxford has an unlimited supply of middle-aged opera-loving attractive single woman.  Or is it Cambridge?  I can never remember.  Oh well, whatever.  Inspector Morse, Thames Valley CID.  Shut up Lewis.  Let's go down the pub so that we can get more sponsorship from the Brewers."

Weasals Of Doom

I'm trying really, really hard to make this post about something other than The Archers.  Don't doubt my venom on this score, I'm going to come back to that subject, but I thought I'd change the subject for a bit.  Except... except, I'm actually having some difficulty with it, because last night's episode was all about Tom and his sausages.  Essentially there was an extended scene in a restaurant where his current girlfriend, Brenda, happened upon the brilliant idea of asking the waiter if they served Tom Archer Sausages, in a very loud and stilted voice, so that other people in the restaurant would hear, and ask about them.

Of course, this is how you know that it's fiction.  You see, in the real world I like to think that a little scheme like this wouldn't reward Brenda with any success; that enthusing about the quality of her boyfriend's sausages (hot or cold) wouldn't drum up custom, but would in fact provoke unrelenting hatred and contempt.  If there was truly any justice, the Waiter would have brought out a revolver on a silver platter, with a note from a gentleman at a nearby table inviting her to do the decent thing.  But no.  And to be honest, these days I find it difficult to remember whether what I really hate about The Archers is the actual characters, or the writers.  Because you know, I can write crap too!  I'm good at it!  Actually, I'm better at it than they are.  But they're getting paid for it, and I'm not.

Ah well.  The nervous breakdown isn't due for a couple of weeks yet, so I'll leave that alone for a bit.  Already in my mind the name 'Ambridge' is twinned wistfully with 'Oradour-sur-Glarne', but my Doctor tells me that I shouldn't dwell too much on things like that, and so I'll try and dwell on something else for a moment or two.

Oh yes, stoats.  Did you know that stoats have occasionally been known to kill horses?  No, really, I read this great article in this month's Fortean Times, all about it.  Actually the article is about stoat-packs, a rare but well-testified phenomenon where normally solitary stoats get into little gangs during very harsh winters.  As a pack, these little carnivores are said to be potentially very dangerous indeed - as I recall there was a short story by Wildlife writer Joyce Stranger, all about a fox running in terror from a stoat pack on a Winter hillside.  In truth this hardly surprises me - I used to know a Russian woman who told a story about how her aunt was attacked by polecats, and while polecats are a lot bigger than Stoats, they are a member of the weasal family.  And really, nobody who has ever been menaced by an overhungry squirrel in a London park can possibly doubt the villainous tendencies of minor rodent species.  Packs of rats are no source of hilarity, so why should stoats be any different?  Well, perhaps it has something to do with the Tufty Club, or Wind In The Willows (wherein the weasals are revealed to be Bolshy revolutionary types, set upon the forcible removal of the corrupt aristocracy... or am I alone in thinking that?)

There is even a theory - not a theory I subscribe to myself, you understand - that the notorious Beast Of Gevaudan, which killed a very large number of people in a two year period in pre-Revolutionary France, was in fact not a wolf at all, but an unknown species of giant killer weasal.  The theory is rather lovely in its completeness and elegance, but I tend to regard it as a load of rubbish, not least because it's obvious to me that the Beast was in fact an escaped Hyaena.  Even so, don't be too surprised if, at some point in the near future, we hear about the Savage Killer Weasals Of The Auvergne.

Point is, this article in The Fortean Times even includes an account from a woman who, as a little girl, was chased up a tree by a pack of ermines during a particularly harsh winter.  Just imagine - packs of little weasaly death machines, lurking in the woodlands and prowling the wilds of Southern England, looking for human prey...

Now, THAT would make a good Archers storyline, and really give Tom Archer a reason to fear for the wellbeing of his precious sausages.

Beware: The Archers

Probably those of you reading this are not particularly familiar with 'The Archers', and if so, oh how I envy you.  I am aware that there are many, many fans of The Archers out there, and that these lunatics are catered for in a number of ways, ranging from BBC discussion boards to official character guides.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I understand that we can all derive pleasure from different things.  Some people enjoy stamps, trains, birds... some people like to watch Coronation Street, others like Eastenders or The Bill, and some like to listen to smug pseudo-rural caricatures discussing manure for 75 minutes every bloody Sunday morning.

My apologies.  I exaggerate, and should probably explain.  I shall give you a simple guide to The Archers, presuming you have escaped its baleful influence before today.

1. What is the Archers?

A Radio 4 programme of unrelenting tedium, strategically positioned between the News and An Interesting Programme twice a day on weekdays, for fifteen minutes each time.  On Sunday an Omnibus edition inflicts a compilation of the entire week's monstrous inanities on the nation for more than an hour.

Mysteriously, The Archers is possibly the most listened-to radio programme on Radio 4, even though much of the rest of Radio 4's output is actually quite good.  This means that even some clever people listen to it, presumably from their own free will.

2. What is it about?

Well essentially The Archers is like Emmerdale with better pictures.  It is, we are told, an 'everyday story of farming folk', though I suspect this to be a lie of sorts (rather as I suspect the Great White Shark to be a fish of sorts).  I confess I am very intrigued by this claim.  Personally I live opposite two farms and rarely find that youths taking horse tranquilisers, crack-smoking yobs, petty adultery, horse mutilation, numerous adulteries, gun sieges, and batches of sour cheese often disrupt my life to any noticeable degree.   

Actually, I should apologise because I've just made the programme sound a lot more exciting than it really is.  Even so, it has indeed featured many of these plots in the last four years or so.  If I then tell you that one entire episode was given over to the discussion of Tom's unacceptable batch of sour cheese, you will perhaps have an idea of how just atrociously the banal and the melodramatic are balanced in this most despicable of programmes.

3. If I hate it so much, why do I listen to it?

Good question.  Fair enough, it had to be asked.  I listen to it for a diversity of reasons.  One is simply that it's always there, right between two programmes that I actually want to listen to.  It just so happens that I often find myself on a train around about 7pm in the evening, and I always think to myself that The Archers doesn't last long, there's no point turning my radio off... but I'm always wrong.  Fifteen minutes is a very long time in the world of The Archers.

However, I have recently realised that there is another, better, reason for my listening to the Archers.  And that is that I have come to enjoy hearing the characters suffer.  This is a rather unfulfilling hobby in truth, because to my mind the people of Ambridge never quite suffer enough.  I've often thought that I should be allowed to write scripts for the programme for a period of about three months, as I'm sure I could do some serious damage to the community in that time.  In fact, thinking of ways in which to make The Archers suffer does actually give me life a little bit more purpose, frankly.

4. Who likes The Archers?

An army of hand-picked madmen and madwomen who regularly spend time on the internet discussing the community implications of the Brian Aldridge's wife-swapping parties and the wellbeing of The Comedy Busybody Woman's Llamas.  I should say, Comedy Busybody Woman does actually have a name, but I can't remember it right now.  Please believe me, however, when I say that my name for her is perfectly accurate, apart from the implication that she's actually funny.  Carol Boyd delivers her lines in a Busybody Woman voice, in case anybody has any doubt about her being a Busybody.  Think Mrs. Mangle From Neighbours without the moral hypocrisy, right-wing politics and Fascist leanings.  Actually, what am I talking about?  Just think Mrs. Mangle with a funny voice.

Anyway, she owns Llamas, whatever she's called.

5. Is it true that unending loop tapes of The Archers Omnibus editions are used as a means of psychological torture in Guantanamo Bay?

Yes, it is.  When a man has heard about the trials and tribulations of Tom's sausage business... his agonising over which labels to use, his soliloquising over the difficulties finding a distributor, and of course his mental anguish at having to sell his businessman's soul to The Evil Brian Aldridge... when you have listened to this for more than 24 hours solid, you're pretty much willing to do anything to make the noises stop.  I expect.

6. Is it true that there was going to be a rampaging Tyrranosaurus Rex in a 2003 plotline of The Archers?

There would have been, but The Archers production office didn't appreciate my input, and wrote back explaining that they had a full quota of writers at that time, the humourless bastards.

You must understand, I was between jobs and had heard rather Too Much of The Archers in Spring and Summer 2003, so by the time August arrived I was somewhat on the edge.  I had survived the gripping plotline of Smug Middle Class Man's beloved baby swallows falling out of their nest without cracking, I had endured the episode devoted to the Stinging Nettle Eating Competition without noticeably breaking into psychotic rage (perhaps because of the sudden intervention of Eccles the nonagenarian Peacock in this dramatic plotline), but it was finally the gripping CSI: Ambridge style storyline about Phil Archer's gratuitous murder of a badger that finally drove me to take action.

This particular storyline was played out at frankly monstrous length and typifies much of what I feel to be wrong with The Archers, and by implication Western Civilisation (since it dumbly tolerates the existence of this aural blight, this auditory equivalent of The Clap).  Phil shot The Badger because of course, as all Rural Stereotypes know, Badgers are little stripey terrorists who spread tuberculosis among the cattle of nice working farmers.  So really, the Badger deserved it.  After all, it was walking along in broad daylight.

After committing this terrible crime, Phil was plunged into a storyline of guilt, deception and retribution as he realised his crime of passion could have terrible consequences.  After all (and please note) it is actually illegal to murder badgers in the United Kingdom, even if one is a mindless walking rural cliche.

Phil attempted to dispose of the body, leaving it by a roadside so that it looked as if it had been hit by a car.  Quite why the brilliant Mr Archer didn't just carve the thing up and feed it to his pigs or burn it or something isn't entirely clear.  Perhaps it had something to do with desperate plotting.  Whatever the reason, Phil was discovered in the act of laying out the murdered Badger, by none other than The Evil Matt Crawford.  In no time at all, Phil found himself confronted by a Policeman and an RSPCA Officer on his doorstep, asking him if he knew anything about the sad demise of Billy Badger.

And then came the autopsy...

As this story was being played out at a CSI-standard level of forensic scrutiny, I came to the conclusion that something had to be done.  I kindly wrote a very nice letter to the production office of The Archers, offering to help them with their future plots.  The principal one I was willing to write for them involved a Tyrannosaurus Rex escaping from a local zoo, eating Phil Archer, and then having an affair with Brian Aldridge's Wife.

For some reason the jokers at the BBC didn't respond to my gracious correspondence for about three months, at the end of which they didn't even comment on my suggested plotline.  Mind you, they just said they didn't have room for any new writers at that time.  Perhaps I could interpret that as meaning that they might in the future.  After all, they didn't say there was anything actually wrong with my storyline.  I can feel another letter coming on...

7. Can't you just shut up about The Archers?

Yes.  And I will.  But don't think I won't come back to the subject.  I believe the expression is 'venting one's spleen'.  It's a necessary operation or I'll just explode in a shower of retained bile and contempt, and you wouldn't want that, now would you?

Budgerigars Of Doom

Oh yes, I forget to say - I actually read in the paper the other day, about how a teenage girl in the UK had nearly been killed by her cockatiel.  Sadly this story wasn't nearly as exciting as it sounded, and I was disappointed to find that there no details of a teenager being torn limb from limb by a cockatiel that had gone on the rampage after OD-ing on cuttlefish.

Instead, the dull truth is that the cockatiel was just a bit dusty, and had made his owner a bit wheezy as a result.  Well, I say 'a bit wheezy', apparently it was a potentially fatal wheeziness.  Even so, it's not that exciting, is it?  It's rather like the way that Budgerigars kill people on a regular basis, but only through transmission of avian psitticosis.  Sadly there are no flocks of carnivorous budgies swooping through the outback, and stripping the flesh from unfortunate kangaroos in under a minute.  Rather a shame, as Steve Irwin would certainly have done a documentary about them.  I would have loved to have seen him being chased by a green cheeping swarm of death, with his six-year-old's enthusiasm writ large on his face... "Crikey!  These budgies are right snakey!"

Which reminds me, poor Mr. Irwin has fallen off his perch, shuffled off his mortal coil, etc.  I know, I know many people found him a bit... annoying... but I could never quite bring myself to dislike him.  I mean, sure, I lost interest in his programmes when I realised how much of them was staged to look unnecessarily dramatic - but when I saw him for the first time, I actually found his treatment of snakes to be quite... impressive.  I mean, usually you see some pasty herpetologist scrabbling after a snake with a pincer-tipped metal pole, and it all looks rather frantic and uncomfortable.  Steve Irwin's tactic was to pick them up the end of the tail, which looked pretty ludicrous since it gave the snake plenty of room to move and hiss and try wave about.  This seems to have been widely regarded as 'daredevil' behaviour, but from what I recall his argument was that it caused the snake less pain than grabbing them by the neck - and if a snake isn't in pain, it is less likely to be angry and aggressive, and less likely to try and bite.  It was also pretty noticeable that Irwin refused to handle some snakes altogether on the grounds that their aggressive temperament made them too dangerous - a fact often overlooked by people willing to criticise his behaviour.

Mind you, there was that time he nearly fed his baby son to a crocodile... still, it beats Michael Jackson's attempt at dangle-based infanticide on sheer style.

Still, I'm told that temperament is a big part of what makes a snake actually dangerous.  There's a species of small tree-snake in South Africa called a Boomslang (literally 'tree-snake' in Afrikaans) which is highly lethal to human beings but which was routinely kept as a pet until the middle of the last century, because the danger it represented wasn't really known about.  Apparently, although the snake could kill humans it was rarely inclined to do so simply because it was a bit of a sissy, with something of a cuddly temperament - and even if it did bite, it's fangs were too small and too far back to guarantee the inject of venom into a wound.  I imagine it was a different story for a mouse, mind you.

Anyway, I heard the news today, oh boy, and it appears that Mr. Irwin has, rather sadly, met an untimely end.  The particular irony of this is that he was killed by a wound inflicted by a Stingray - and while wounds inflicted by these animals are far from unknown, it appears that actual fatalities caused by them are almost unheard of.  It's rather bizarre that a man who spent so much time in the company of highly venomous animals, and who was widely thought to be living on borrowed time due to the risks he took, should finally meet his maker due to a barney with a grumpy kipper.

Cockatiel Of Doom

I suppose I should have said before now, the reason why I chose 'scary parrot' as my user name on here. Frankly the reason is that I couldn't think of anything better.  However it was also because a long time ago I did actually own a number of parroty type birds.  None of them were actual parrots, you understand - the biggest were cockatiels.  And of the cockatiels there was one in particular that I was fond of, and which 'Scary Parrot' is kind of a tribute to.

This particular bird was originally called 'Skipper' (named after a murderer in an American TV series, my mother assures me), but that was soon shortened to 'Skippy'.  Cockatiels are strictly speaking a lesser species of Cockatoo, and are generally considered to be rather gentle-tempered.  Certainly, compared to your average hen budgerigar, they're a model of nervous shyness.  Mind you, in some respects the average crocodile is a model of nervous shyness next to a geriatric hen budgie.

Cockatiels however, are generally very passive and so tend to be somewhat harassed through their lives if kept in an aviary with other, smaller birds.  Skippy's father was a bird called Charlie, and Charlie was a very gentle old bird.  In later life - and Cockatiels can be very old, Charlie was about 20 when he died - Charlie started to look rather owlish, and had two hobbies that kept him busy.  One was trying to fit into nest boxes that were too small for him; he enjoyed this game very much, and it was not at all uncommon to find his backside poking out of a nesting box meant for a zebra finch.  He would usually extricate himself when he realised he was being watched, and then hang on the outside of the box with a slightly embarrassed look on his face.

Charlie's other hobby was Sitting Still.  He tended to look very much like the Grandfather Of The Aviary when he did this, not without justification.  However, the Zebra Finches had no real respect for his seniority, and would often buzz past at speed, with no consideration for his personal space.  Gracefully the old gentleman put up with it.

Skippy was never really noted for his passivity or patience, however.  Despite being hatched in the aviary, he was hand-raised by my mother.  This is not an easy task by any means, and by her account it involved almost the same level of round-the-clock care as a human baby, if you can believe that.  Granted, changing newspaper in an incubator is probably a lot easier than changing nappies, but even so...

It should be said that baby cockatiels are, even by the standards of baby birds, astonishingly ugly.  I remember seeing one of these little creatures and thinking that it looked exactly like a Gargoyle.  I had only just learned what a gargoyle was, but the Cockatiel baby has remained pretty much my image of what a gargoyle should look like.  The impression certainly was helped by the fact that the first time I saw one, it was sitting under it's mother.  Passive Cockatiels may be, but when disturbed on the nest, they will sway and hiss and make lunges with their beaks, and generally do their best to look nasty.  And sure, I did say they were passive, but I don't ever recommend you pick one up against it's will without wearing leather gloves first.

(Mind you, Charlie learned very quickly what The Leather Glove meant, and although I'm sure it was never the cause of any damage to him beyond hurting his dignity, he learned to bite it hard, and on sight.  Of course this was rather silly really as the moment he fastened himself onto the glove, you didn't really have to try to catch him)

Because Skippy was raised by human hand, he was unusually tame (unusually for the cockatiels in our aviary).  For a long time this simply meant, as far as I was concerned, that he was the bird most likely to bite me.  Indeed, because he had no fear at all of humans, he would never even think of flying away from one, but rather he would bite them if they did anything to annoy him.  This was a philosophy he extended to his interaction with other birds, and to just about anything that irritated him really.  So, if he was gracious enough to invite himself to sit on your shoulder, he would be greatly offended if you suddenly dared to look left or right, and would usually launch an attack at your neck to let you know your mistake.  Or, if you dug the bottom of the aviary (it was soil, so it needed to be turned over once a week) Skippy would show an interest by landing on your bent-over back - but he would strenuously object to the thought of you actually standing up again, and explain this by running up to your shoulder and biting you.

Added to this, the little barbarian loved attention.  It didn't matter what the truth of his behaviour was, if he was ever introduced to a stranger, he would be on his very best behaviour, friendly and gracious and they would go away with the impression of him being charming and endearing.  Once he'd got used to them he'd revert to normal behaviour of course, but the sight of Skippy being introduced to a stranger was almost sickening in how false he became.  Lots of elegant whistling and bowing, lots of gently stepping along somebody's arm with a sort of smile-type-expression on his face.  Possibly it might have disturbed our visitors if I'd told them that Skippy's behaviour looked rather like he was propositioning them in Cockatiel language.

But then... Skippy wasn't into birds.  Oh, he had one daughter, but basically he found sitting on eggs far too boring and was a useless father.  We had to take his lone baby away because he would peck her on sight.  Skippy wasn't immune to the charms of Lady Cockatiels but he much preferred humans.  This was simply because, like a lot of birds that are hand-raised, he seems to have thought he was a human.  In fact I suspect there are a lot of animals that are willing to communicate with humans on their own terms, but which we don't usually recognise.  The most obvious one is the way that a cat narrows its eyes to either ask "can we be friends" or to say "yes, we're friends" - to ask for acceptance, or to give it.  This, supposedly, is the reason why cats sometimes go and sit on the lap of the one person in the room who really doesn't like cats - humans narrow their eyes as an instinctive response to something that makes them uncomfortable, and cats take this as acceptance.

With Cockatiels, I knew of one sad little example of a bird called Lucy, who was typically shy but very sweet-tempered.  She had a boyfriend of sorts, but the problem with him was that he was completely stupid.  So much so, in fact, that in the end I conceded to the inevitable and changed his name to 'Stupid'.  If that seems harsh, I should explain that Stupid thought he was a world-class singer, but had not yet learned that even the Cockatiel Love Warble should probably include at least two notes.  Nor did he understand that it was best addressed to Lady Cockatiels, and not senile gentleman Budgerigars.

I think a previous owner had kept Stupid in a small aviary with just a budgerigar as company, and so you might say the inevitable had happened, and Stupid had acquired a preference for Budgies.  Apart from the distress this caused the poor budgies, it also looked very silly as a cockatiels is at least twice the size of a budgie.  Whatever the cause of Stupid's... predilection... it was only when we no longer had any budgies that he turned his attenton grudgingly to poor wallflower Lucy.

Lucy was a very nice bird - not particularly in good condition, or with very good markings, but she had a gentle temper, loved the rain and would hang upside down with her wings out to fully appreciate it, and she was friendly in spite of her shyness.  Occasionally, if I whistled flatteringly at her, she would lower her head towards me, a rather sad gesture as she seemed to be indicating that if I wanted to preen her feathers she would let me.  Obviously this was something I was neither inclined nor well-equipped to do.

Skippy was rarely so gentle about it.  He never asked me to preen his feathers, and would probably have bitten me anyway if he thought I was going to.  If I'm honest I did tease him sometimes by touching the back of his head, which would prompt a lot of threatening squeaks and arching back of his head, ready to launch a bite on my finger tip.  This was as close as it got to him letting me touch him.  On the other hand, he was always ready to preen me, the way he saw it.  This was a lovely gesture on his part, except that he believed the required preening involved gently leaning forward from my shoulder, and savagely yanking my stubble out, one by one.

Frankly Skippy did scarier things than this in his time, and a lot of more endearing things too... but if I told you of these then this post would go on forever.  Skippy died in 1998, at the age of 19.  I will probably never own another aviary bird, as much as I would like to.  So, my memories of Skippy are fond memories, and they lurk in my mind enough for me to have thought up the name 'Scary Parrot' when asked what I wanted my blog name to be.

I dare say that somewhere above the clouds right now, Skippy is sitting on a celestial tree branch next to Charlie, cursing the zebra finches that St. Peter let in.  Or possibly he's in Bird Hell, currently lording it over a clan of Pterodactyls he's taken over.  Either is possible.

New Clear

I'm not the first to have made this observation, but it's REALLY bothering me...

If it's really necessary for one man to have complete and total authority to unleash the largest arsenal of atomic weaponry in the world, I'd quite like it if he was at least capable of pronouncing the word 'nuclear' correctly.  'Nukular'?  WTF, is the man still at school???

THE ARCHERS MUST DIE

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:  Don't listen to The Archers.  It makes you want to kill people.