'He then put a vibrator up his jumper...'

Here's a story I came across in my local paper. I pass it on because, for various reasons, it made me laugh, and because it seemed such a perfect vignette of (low) life in contemporary Britain...

'A thieving drug addict who stole a £49 sex toy while shopping with his pregnant girlfriend blamed the welfare state for his crime of passion.
  Lee Friend-Huggett, 33, appeared at Croydon Magistrates Court on Monday, charged with the theft of a vibrator from Ann Summers in the town centre.
  The prosecution said: "Mr Friend-Huggett went to Ann Summers with his girlfriend when he proceeded to the vibrator section of the store. He then put a vibrator up his jumper and left the shop with no intention to pay for it.
  He was arrested and told police he wasn't at Ann Summers at the time and was, instead, at a drug rehabilitation programme.
  He then insisted that it was not him that was in the shop, but his twin brother."
  Friend-Huggett, however, pleaded guilty on Monday...'

It's all there, isn't it? The welfare state connection, by the way, is that our friend the thieving drug addict explained that he stole the vibrator because he had not (he claimed) received his benefit money. Shame on us taxpayers for not coughing up punctually to support this fine fellow's lifestyle.

Scott McKenzie again

My old friend, the Sage of Tiverton, surprised me with the sad news that Scott McKenzie died last week. As my birthday post from his 70th attracted a ridiculous number of hits for no obvious reasons, I'll repost it. Poor Scott died of Guillaine-Barre syndrome. There's an obit here.
  I like the image of Scott walking around barefoot in Joshua Tree, talking to plants. Pretty standard behaviour in Joshua Tree, I imagine. Scott also used to talk to, and hang around with, that self-destructive genius Gram Parsons, with whom he wrote songs (never recorded), doodled on the guitar and got drunk.
 In his later years, McKenzie wrote this rather lovely sketch of himself: 'Reclusive septuagenarian. I live with a 15 year old cat named Spider in Silverlake, which is in Los Angeles. I spend lots of time on the internet, mainly researching all sorts of things - I can't recall how I spent my time before Google. I was a professional singer for years, had a 1967 hit called "If You're Going to San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair". I sang at The Monterey Pop Festival. I've lived In New York City; Laurel Canyon; San Francisco; Virginia Beach. I cherish my friends, many of whom have passed on. This trend shows no signs of abating.'

Remembering Dickie H

I see the Scarborough Cricket Festival takes place next week. Ah the memories...
  Back in my boyhood days, I'd often be there, with my brother, neatly clad in our little sports jackets, enjoying the beautiful airy seaside ground, the comings and goings, the old geezers in white coats selling the Pink 'Un, and whatever was going on on the field. Those were Yorkshire's glory days - from the all-conquering Ray Illingworth team to Brian Close and the rise of a young bespectacled chap called Geoffrey Boycott - and the visitors always seemed to be having fun, cutting loose and giving it some welly. I remember seeing even the notoriously stroke-averse Australian Bill Lawry ('the corpse with pads on') whacking the ball all over the ground...
  Sometimes the stars of the summer shows would drop in too. One I remember seeing is Dickie Henderson, a comedian and entertainer who is no doubt forgotten now by everyone but me and my brother (and, I'll warrant, Malty). A short dapper chap, permatanned and nimble on his feet (he was a dancer as well), he was long on easy, not to say oily, charm and somewhat short on comic material. He had a relaxed air and a mid-Atlantic accent that suggested rather more sophistication than he possessed - but at least the accent, unlike the similar drawl affected by his pal and frequent collaborator Bob Monkhouse, was earned. Dickie spent much of his childhood in Hollywood, where his father, rotund singer and dancer Dick Henderson (who made the first British recording of Tiptoe Through the Tulips), was touring in vaudeville. As a child actor, young Dickie appeared in the film of Noel Coward's Cavalcade, and, with Cicely Courtneidge and Max Miller, in Things Are Looking Up. He was being seriously considered for the young David in George Cukor's David Copperfield when his father hauled him back to Blighty. And there he was, a quarter of a century later, topping the bill at the Floral Hall, Scarborough, and enjoying the hospitality at the cricket ground. I may be wrong, but he looked like a man who hadn't often said no to a drink.

Odd

I caught a piece of news this morning that normally I wouldn't have taken much notice of, but something in it made me sit up and pay attention. The British Retail Consortium, having done a survey, has concluded that online crime cost British retailers 'at least' £205.4 million last year (these wild guesstimates always come up with a strangely precise figure). So far, so unsurprising - but wait a minute: it turns out that, of that figure, only £77.3 million was lost to actual fraud. The rest was largely accounted for by the cost of fraud-prevention measures and - an estimated £111.6 million - by business lost when honest would-be purchasers became so frustrated by endless online security checks that they gave up the attempt to buy. So, anti-fraud measures are costing retailers a great deal more than fraud. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't know quite what it is. Perhaps that sometimes it's easier just to go to a shop.

Signs of the Times

I haven't seen a single Lime Hawk Moth this year, but earlier today, as I was sitting in the gardens that were once the old Kensington churchyard, I had the pleasure of watching a big plump Lime Hawk caterpillar making its way across the path in front of me. It wasn't a young one in its bright green skin (with yellow go-faster stripes) but an ageing specimen, nearly ready to pupate, the skin mottled and indigo-tinged, like the one in the picture.
 Caterpillar motion is a wondrous thing - a muscular contraction that passes from the hind end to the front, propelling the larva forward at a surprisingly smart pace. It's restful and faintly comic to watch. The one that crossed my path was heading determinedly away from the trees and towards open lawn, which seemed odd, but I left it to its own devices and soon it had disappeared into the grass...
 When I got back to the office, I found a single poplar leaf had fallen into my bag. It's in front of me now - dry, russet-gold, curling at the edges and the tip. Autumn is coming.

A Walker

I learned yesterday that one of the group of friends with whom I have been walking off and on - mostly off - for 30 years and more, has died. I say 'one of' but he was a stalwart, the stalwart of the group. He seldom missed a walk, and was the strongest walker among us, always in the vanguard, striding along, whatever the weather, whatever the terrain, uphill or down - keeping up with him was a challenge; we generally took it in turns to walk a while by his side before falling back, outpaced.
 Then, a couple of years ago, symptoms of Parkinson's Disease became sadly apparent, and walking was more and more a struggle for him; he fell back to the rearguard and eventually, having kept walking as long as he possibly could, he had to give up. It turned out that the Parkinson's symptoms had been masking the advance of cancer, and there was only going to be one ending. He bore the illness, the treatments, and the prospect of his death, with the most exemplary calm and stoicism. Which, couched in more Christian language, would sound very much like one of the innumerable epitaphs he must have read in a lifetime of church crawling. But - unlike, probably, many of those epitaphs - it is true.
  He was a man of very wide interests, knowledgeable, well read and with a notably well furnished mind. A master of the ingeniously turned (not to say excruciating) pun, he was also a rich source of quotations and allusions. Once, while booting up for a day's walking, he turned to me and remarked, quoting Montaigne: 'Il faut toujours être botté et prêt à partir.' Booted and ready to leave. And so he was.

Dog Days

These are the dog days, Fortunatus... The stupefying heat and humidity of the past weekend in the Southeast did a pretty effective job of closing me down for the duration, at least as far as mental activity went, though I did manage some sweat-streaming work in the garden and a train journey into Oxfordshire (and on my return journey hit a mighty swiftstorm - I'd guess at least 30 or 40, circling in a feeding frenzy, no doubt in preparation for the flight South). Other people - to judge by the angry cries from parks and gardens and the constant coming and going of wailing patrol cars and ambulances - were being driven plumb loco by the heat. It's hardly surprising, given that this kind of weather comes in such short spells that we never get a chance to acclimatise and adjust - that's the trouble with living in a country with no climate and a ridiculous amount of weather.
But the butterflies were out in what numbers they could muster, enjoying the sunshine. And, today, there was a hen blackbird basking in an apparent state of ecstasy in a flowerbed in Kensington Gardens, wings spread, head lifted, mandibles apart, much like Bernini's St Theresa. This was not in fact sunbathing, let alone religious ecstasy - the blackbird was sitting on an antheap, enjoying the sensation of ants crawling on its skin, killing off mites. They call it formication - but it ain't no sin.